|
Lyapunov Unstable posted:I've unleashed the endless stream of words haven't I the endless stream of the dialectical evolution of human history according to material conditions cannot be stopped, comrade
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 21:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 16:42 |
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Then what's the point in things like unions and organized striking? If you ask a typical union organizer they'd say collective bargaining for a pay rise, employment protection, and better working conditions. None of that includes overthrowing the capitalist class. Revolutionary unions are very violent, in america alone there were huge gun battles between them and Henry Ford's goons. There's countless other examples. OwlFancier posted:If the road to revolution is military force then why bother with the political side of it? If guns and guillotines are what's needed then why advocate for anything else? For a revolution, you need popular support. Gaining popular support for your political goals is politics. OwlFancier posted:I was given to understand that the best force to apply against Capital is to starve it by withdrawing the labour it needs to function, because it has a monopoly on force of arms, and without de-legitimizing the basis by which it wields them you will lose any armed conflict, and if you can de-legitimize capital, why do you need to impose a military dictatorship to keep it that way? Capital has an army and the state. They will not look out the window and go "oh well, better give up" if they see a general strike. You can pack central london with a million people chanting "Bourgeoisie out!" and they will ignore you because you aren't actually a threat. Begin to disrupt the function of the state, though, and they will send in riot police. Political power comes from your ability to enforce it with as much strength as you need to at any given moment. "Military dictatorship" is a crude term that betrays your true sympathies. The purpose of a revolutionary army is to overthrow a state and create a dictatorship of the proletariat, the current dictatorship of the bourgeoisie also has a military. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Feb 9, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 21:41
|
|
|
Ormi posted:Well, not exactly. Contemporary anarchists were initially on-board with the Bolshevik program. "All Power to the Soviets!" after all. Lenin himself actually had a fairly significant libertarian streak in his earlier writings. It was specifically things like the invasion of the Free Territory, dismantling the Factory Committees, and quashing the Kronstadt uprising that saw most anarchist and left communist support for the revolution fade away. Oh absolutely. I'm just trying to give newbies a broad overview of how contemporary left wing ideologies interpret the past. Actually digging into the past will produce all kinds of weird historical incidents like early socialists who thought capital and labour would be natural allies against the aristocracy, or the fact that Karl Marx exchanged friendly correspondences with Abraham Lincoln and was a regular columnist in the Republican Party's most important and influential newspaper of the 1850s and 60s, the New-York Tribune.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 21:43
|
|
|
If anyone reading this wants to answer one of these questions, feel free! I'm still reading but I realized this is probably enough questions, and I'm trying to do this at work and  so...rodatose - Thanks for the definitions and the rundown on the anarchism - Can you get more specific on how he thought the process of moving from capitalism to socialism would actually happen? I'm assuming he was what you called a revolutionary socialist then? - Could you, or anyone, tell me about Lenin or the Russian Revolution? The same with Mao, and China. Anarcho-primitivism reminds me of that speech Tyler Durden gives in Fight Club (or the movie at least) Helsing - Can you tell me more about the disagreements within the USSR and the splitting that happened? Or maybe about the out Trotsky and his movement? - Or maybe about the events of 1968? - Who are Foucault and Derrida and how were they involved in the leftist movement? And thanks, I'll keep that in mind. Dead Cosmonaut - Can you tell me about Das Kapital? Or about what his critiques of capitalism were? What was this scientific approach he had? Thanks for the link, I'll take a look. VIL - Can you get a little deeper into his thoughts on the whole "people's relations to those systems" thing? - Or maybe go in the opposite direction and tell me about some of those weird observations and tangents? - I'm sorry, the "asiatic mode" is generally accepted? - What is Marx's meaning of exploitation? - Can you tell me more about how he thinks the proletariat would seize control and dissolve? rudatron - Can you tell me more about the early state-socialists and utopian socialism (what kind of work projects)? What were/are Fourierism and Fabianism? - What are the changes occurring in the evolution of socialism to communism? I guess I'm still not entirely clear on how they are different mechanically
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 21:46
|
|
|
Gazpacho posted:Marxism is a theory of relationships among phenomena. It is not ceteris paribus testable, but a lot of theory about human beings isn't. On this note, OP, David Harvey gave an interesting series of lectures on interpreting Capital and released it as a podcast. I can't speak to how accurate it is to the ideology of modern Marxists, but it will explain a lot of the terms people use if you want to put in the time.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 21:46
|
|
|
HorseLord posted:For a revolution, you need popular support. I concur, for either my definition of revolution or yours, this is part of the point. HorseLord posted:Capital has an army and the state. They will not look out the window and go "oh well, better give up" if they see a general strike. You can pack central london with a million people chanting "Bourgeoisie out!", and they will simply send in riot police. Political power comes from your ability to enforce it with as much strength as you need to at any given moment. Yes capital has an army and the state, however both are made up of people. If you have popular support, why does that not extend to state workers and the armed forces? There aren't enough police in London to contain a million strong protest. Political power in this instance comes from fear of the alternative. That's how Capital works, it makes people think they 1. don't want to oppose it and 2. that it's some kind of natural law. If people want to oppose it and believe they can oppose it, it has very little power. If you're proposing open warfare against the state and army, with all the death that entails, I'm assuming you're willing to send people to die in protests and strikes? They literally can't kill everyone, because the state and the bourgeoisie can't exist without the proletariat. I entirely acknowledge that a general strike or anything else comparable would be ridiculously difficult to organize when you consider the pressures arrayed against that kind of idea, but I am suggesting that a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would be equally far fetched and that anything less far fetched would not be any such thing as a dictatorship of the proletariat. If you haven't got overwhelming popular support, you're just a normal dictatorship. Perhaps a benevolent one, with high ideals, but not a rule of the people.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 21:54
|
|
|
Cingulate posted:The main point is still: being able to explain stuff does not make a framework scientific, and adding the tendency to adapt the theory to new evidence makes it, if at all, even less scientific. That is literally what science does. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 21:54
|
|
|
I second the request for Foucault and Derrida. How does their philosophy relate to that of Hegel, AKA that on which Marx's theory is based?
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 21:54
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Yes capital has an army and the state, however both are made up of people. If you have popular support, why does that not extend to state workers and the armed forces? Ask the white army. OwlFancier posted:I entirely acknowledge that a general strike or anything else comparable would be ridiculously difficult to organize when you consider the pressures arrayed against that kind of idea, but I am suggesting that a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would be equally far fetched and that anything less far fetched would not be any such thing as a dictatorship of the proletariat. If you haven't got overwhelming popular support, you're just a normal dictatorship. Perhaps a benevolent one, with high ideals, but not a rule of the people. You seem to have the idea that support for a political movement amongst the population of a country is either 100% or 0%. That's really weird. There are plenty of fascist, nationalist working class people, but we don't have to give them the franchise in a socialist state, or wait until they reform their politics and defect from the British army before beginning a revolution. If you had, for example, 80% of politically active workers being pro vs 20% being anti, it would still be a super-majority. That 80% of proletarians suppressing the other 20% would not suddenly be unproletarian. Please get a grip. By the way are you still arguing "as a marxist"? Because uh, guess who came up with the dictatorship of the proletariat? HorseLord fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Feb 9, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 22:00
|
|
|
site posted:- What are the changes occurring in the evolution of socialism to communism? I guess I'm still not entirely clear on how they are different mechanically As I understand it Socialism is the word for the state ownership of the means of production (as VIL outlined the term). Socialism is when there is a state and the state is very strong, but it is made up of the Proletariat via democracy of some kind. It exists to ensure that the things which make our lives possible, goods production, infrastructure, healthcare, all that jazz, are owned and run for the benefit of everyone. It's generally what's meant by the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" because the state has enormous power, but it's derived from the will of the people and its power is used to serve the people according to their needs. Marx suggests that this state would involve massive reserve armies of labour at the disposal of the state to work on things like agriculture and major public projects, though this perhaps may be a little old fashioned when you consider how far automation has come. Communism is what happens after that, Marx suggested that the state would eventually become unneccessary. The idea being that eventually the state would not be needed to be the shield against the return of the Bourgeoisie, because wealth would have been redistributed so thoroughly, and the ideals of Socialism would be so ingrained into society that Communism would occur, which I think is supposed to be sort of equivalent to Capitalism now, you don't need a state really to enforce the ideals of Capitalism, it's so ingrained into our society and modern history that people just accept it, and as such it's very stable. Communism is supposed to be when the state is simply dissolved and people just agree to co-operate with each other because the notion of communal ownership and operation of the means of production is second nature. The state would become redundant as people simply believe in the laws it once had to enforce and most of its power doesn't need to be exercised. I admit I'm not entirely clear on exaclty how this is supposed to happen and there is a great deal of contention as to whether it's just utopian airy fairy rubbish. I would suggest that it's a bit of a singularity, as the suggested societal changes are so great as to render any hypotheses about what happens beyond that point rather difficult to test. HorseLord posted:Ask the white army. If you have 80% support for your ideas you do not need to kill people to achieve them. I have no objection to suppression via democracy but I really don't see where the bit about armed uprising comes in.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 22:04
|
|
|
HorseLord posted:That is literally what science does. Point being, while scientific theories do explain things, this is not what distinguishes them from pseudo- and non-scientific theories. Most of your ugly picture is not "Explain things", but e.g. repeated tests. To cut a long story short, Popper came up with basically the model you've posted specifically in response to ("vulgar") Marxism, which he particularly observed to be very unlike actual science, in that it did explain many things, - in fact, all things -, but was not practiced as a thing that could be tested, in the sense that it could have been falsified. The picture you posted was constructed to show that Marxism is not science.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 22:07
|
|
|
Cingulate posted:Yes, and Hitler didn't eat meat; thus, Nazism is a form of vegetarianism.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 22:21
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:If you have 80% support for your ideas you do not need to kill people to achieve them. I have no objection to suppression via democracy but I really don't see where the bit about armed uprising comes in. You could not actually be more wrong. There's literally no event in human history where the bourgeoisie have, as an entire class, voluntarily handed over their power, no matter how large the group politely asking for them to do so is. It has never happened ever. What has always happened is that they simply ignore polite requests, and deny impolite ones using as much force as they need to. They can do this because, if we continue the example, they have 20% of the politically active proletariat at their command. They will make up the bulk of any of the state's violent organizations, particularly if those organizations are volunteer ones, like modern armies, and the police. It is worse than just the formal army and the police, because in revolutionary times, informal reactionary violent groups form. They even still do in peace time. Revolutions, the deliberate, coordinated overthrow of one ruling class by another, are violent. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Feb 9, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 22:22
|
|
|
Lyapunov Unstable posted:Hey does any brand of economics pass this? And still: it is not bad to not be scientific. It is bad to be pseudo-scientific (claim to be a science, while not being a science). Even if there was no actual science on the planet, it would still be bad if anybody claimed Marxism to be a science when it isn't.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 22:29
|
|
|
Again, I don't expect people to hand over power voluntarily, I expect them to have no choice against an organized non-compliant populace. Again, if you have popular support, you should be able to achieve this, if you don't have popular support, perhaps you can overthrow the minority bourg with a slightly large minority of proletarians, but what you have then is not a dictatorship of the proletariat, but just a normal dictatorship, a minority ruling for what it believes in. Like, if you seize power militarily you're also going to end up with an inordinate concentration of militarists at the helm. Unless your new dictator uses their power to institute a constitutionally socialist democracy without getting bumped off by either the CIA or one of their mates, I don't see how it lasts. A democratic revolution both preserves the apparent structure of many modern states, thus giving it a greater probability of international legitimacy, as well as a greater proximity to an actual dictatorship of the proletariat. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Feb 9, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 22:30
|
|
|
Scientific inquiry existed before Popper came along and while some people regard him as a final arbiter of what should be included, I would not.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 22:48
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Again, I don't expect people to hand over power voluntarily, I expect them to have no choice against an organized non-compliant populace. It is simple, they use their guns on the non-compliant to get them to comply. You remind me of that other guy who was in here, you both have no grasp of marxist reasoning. But while he couldn't do the reasoning but accepted Marx's conclusions, you can't... do either? Why did you call yourself a marxist again? OwlFancier posted:A democratic revolution both preserves the apparent structure of many modern states, thus giving it a greater probability of international legitimacy, as well as a greater proximity to an actual dictatorship of the proletariat. No, a "democratic revolution" preserves the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, by preserving the bourgeoisie's state. This is not the dictatorship of the proletariat, because it is not by them or for them, it does not disenfranchise the bourgeois as the proletariat are under the bourgeoisie. It doesn't do anything revolutionary. Your whole conception of things was proved hogwash with the Attlee cabinet: 70 years later still no further away from capitalism, no closer to socialism, and no closer to having the working class be the ruling class. There is nothing that you have said in our discussion which reflects reality. No chapter of history you can point to as proof. All you have is pacifist feelings. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Feb 9, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 22:52
|
|
|
Gazpacho posted:Scientific inquiry existed before Popper came along
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 22:58
|
|
|
Socialism by stages is not inevitably successful in one go. We did well in establishing nationalized industries and then we shat it up by not going further. The issue is with the lack of follow up, not the first step. I mean if we're going to get historical I don't think the Red Army did very well in establishing a proletarian government either. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Feb 9, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 23:15
|
|
|
One major flaw in Marx' analysis, which he of course couldn't account for, is today's inevitable ecological collapse. In a paradoxical way, both his own, and today's neoliberals base their predictions on a theoretical endless economical growth.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 23:20
|
|
|
Nosfereefer posted:One major flaw in Marx' analysis, which he of course couldn't account for, is today's inevitable ecological collapse. In a paradoxical way, both his own, and today's neoliberals base their predictions on a theoretical endless economical growth. This actually isn't true: Marx's analysis isn't predicated on endless economic growth. There is a famous section in Capital (Chapter 15.10) in which Marx discusses the ecological impact of capitalist agriculture: Karl Marx posted:In the sphere of agriculture, modern industry has a more revolutionary effect than elsewhere, for this reason, that it annihilates the peasant, that bulwark of the old society, and replaces him by the wage-labourer. Thus the desire for social changes, and the class antagonisms are brought to the same level in the country as in the towns. The irrational, old-fashioned methods of agriculture are replaced by scientific ones. Capitalist production completely tears asunder the old bond of union which held together agriculture and manufacture in their infancy. But at the same time it creates the material conditions for a higher synthesis in the future, viz., the union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the more perfected forms they have each acquired during their temporary separation. Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer. But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the maintenance of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its restoration as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. In agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation of labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman’s individual vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of the rural labourers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2016 23:57
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Socialism by stages is not inevitably successful in one go. We did well in establishing nationalized industries and then we shat it up by not going further. The issue is with the lack of follow up, not the first step. The goal of the movers and shakers in the Labour party was not socialism. They were social democrats firmly on the side of capitalism-imperialism. Their program was to protect the bourgeoisie by appeasing the proletariat's immediate demands, therefore neutralizing any potential revolutionary movement at what was a very critical time to do so. You can see this both in their rabid anti-communism and their modernization, but not discontinuation, of imperialist foreign policy, not to mention the willing transfer of power back towards the blue team. I could say "the master's tools will not destroy the master's house", but I'd also like to underline they especially won't when the master is still holding them. OwlFancier posted:I mean if we're going to get historical I don't think the Red Army did very well in establishing a proletarian government either. They succeeded wholeheartedly. The Soviet Communist party went out of it's way to recruit and train workers and peasants, not as a mere chair filling move, but to fill the uppermost ranks of the party. This was true even in it's dying days - Gorby and Yeltsin were peasants. Your understanding of Marxism and of the history of socialism is very poor, and reminds me of the sort of crap I used to think back when I'd only recently became interested in politics, and hadn't yet hit the books. The difference between present day you and teenage me though, is that I never held on to the delusion that my novice self knew better than 150 years of human endeavour. Simply unlike you, I never called myself a Marxist without knowing what he stood for and his reasons. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Feb 10, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 00:10
|
|
|
quickly posted:This actually isn't true: Marx's analysis isn't predicated on endless economic growth. There is a famous section in Capital (Chapter 15.10) in which Marx discusses the ecological impact of capitalist agriculture: I think he meant "the liberals of Marx's day" there.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 00:12
|
|
|
site posted:- Thanks for the definitions and the rundown on the anarchism Yeah, Marx was a revolutionary socialist, though near the end of their life they conceded that it would be possible for England to peacefully enact a transition to socialism and then to communism, which had a developed and organized working class from having capitalism long enough. Still, Marx was insistent on the necessity of the state, while anarchists decried its illegitimacy and undemocratic nature. Since they were affiliated with the Communist party, and they're probably most known for the Communist Manifesto (which I frankly think is not very substantive), they and most who follow offshoots of their doctrine are most widely known as a Communist. For Democratic Socialists, you could simply have a popular vote on it and if whatever existing body of lawmakers/rulers agreed to implement the changes and relinquish power, then a new constituion could be drawn up with new rights or what have you. There are plenty of other "hows" that individual authors cane up with. Marx derisively refereed to those authors for "writing recipes for the kitchens of the future" so Marx never gave a detailed how-to and was deliberately vague on details of what is to be, something that has been exploited by many future revolutionaries when they wish to claim their own sect as the true one. One particular author who got famous for their proposal of a "how it will be" socialist programme was Edward Bellamy, for their utopian novel Looking Backward (2000-1887). It's about someone who falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in a utopian socialist boston, where there is full employment, no hunger, plenty of leisure time to work on arts, a national "industrial army" (jobs corp), debit cards which pay your work credits for consumer goods, and near instant home delivery of goods. The book got popular irl and "bellamy clubs" were formed for how to implement its ideas. quote:Could you, or anyone, tell me about Lenin or the Russian Revolution? The same with Mao, and China. I'm hugely lacking on both those things. I'd appreciate any good book recommends here  The only book i've read on Mao concentrated more on the meeting between nixon and mao, which was a part of China trying to form a coalition against their new rivals, the USSR. The USSR wanted their model of Communism to be the one adopted across the world with power flowing from Moscow; China obviously did not want this especially with the rise of chinese nationalism from a hundred or so years of being subject to foreign rule and divisions of China divided into client states. Both sides accused each other of being ~revisionists~ (revising the historical truths marx supposedly laid out for their own regimes) and tensions were mounting. As was mentioned upthread, Mao had done rural guerilla warfare from some hilly/mountainous region, and when coming to power their favoritism for small-scale agrarian folks, which may have influenced projects like putting iron kilns in backyards and planting corn and potatoes on hillsides. These projects were failures; small scale kilns didn't produce high-quality iron, and cultivating hillsides in rural regions contributed to massive river flooding. That's a problem of having someone in charge who has no accountability and complete power to implement ideas; you don't need to test anything and no one is willing to step in and offer criticism when it's known you have a habit of shooting associates who you are suspicious of. Rodatose fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Feb 10, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 00:20
|
|
|
If you take someone out of a field and put them in an political office, train them to be political officers, and give them the lifestyle associated with that, they cease to be proletarian. People aren't born bourgeois or proletarian, it is a function of their life. Now the life they live is likely heavily influenced by the circumstances of their birth, but it is that life that makes them who they are. A centralized, authoritarian government which dictates everything about a country is not communist, it may be socialist, but it is not communist and I see very little way in which it can be proletarian. It is simply another form of oligarchy, whereby adherence to the prevailing ideology determines one's fitness to rule over others. That ideology may be socialist for a time but it is unlikely to remain so, and it is unlikely to progress past that. You can't dictate socialism from a minority government, because it will be assailed from all sides by dissent. Either a proletarian government represents a true democracy, and a true dispersal of power into the hands of the people, requiring from them political accountability and affording them political enfranchisement, or it's just more of the same. Either a socialism flavored dictatorship or, as you put it, social democratic capitalism. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Feb 10, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 00:25
|
|
|
Rodatose posted:Both sides accused each other of being ~revisionists~ (revising the historical truths marx supposedly laid out for their own regimes) and tensions were mounting. Revisionism is to throw away what is known to be true (both historically speaking, and in terms of what is proven scientifically with Marxism-Leninism) for petty political gain. China and a fair few other socialist states were right to Label Khrushchev's CPSU as a revisionist party. They abandoned class struggle. They selectively abandoned, and selectively misconstrued Marxist-Leninist understanding of imperialism for that peaceful co-existence nonsense which they knew to be impossible. Marxism-Leninism as an actual living science died out in the USSR in many ways, because when it pointed to something inconvenient for the Khrushchev/Brezhnev Administrations, it was ignored. It's pretty ironic though, that China itself went whole hog in that "peaceful co-existance" crap. Cosy up to the USA against the USSR and for the meanwhile imperialism won't target you. Great plan, shame you have to throw out any semblance of internationalism but oh well... The astoundingly wrong theory the CPC had to create to justify this did an incredible amount of damage. You had self styled Maoists teaming up with the loving Taliban against "social imperialist" soviet feminism and clean drinking water. OwlFancier posted:If you take someone out of a field and put them in an political office, train them to be political officers, and give them the lifestyle associated with that, they cease to be proletarian. People aren't born bourgeois or proletarian, it is a function of their life. Now the life they live is likely heavily influenced by the circumstances of their birth, but it is that life that makes them who they are. I hate to break it to you but most of Labour, even back then, were posh their entire lives. OwlFancier posted:A centralized, authoritarian government which dictates everything about a country is not communist, it may be socialist, but it is not communist Good thing they didn't name it the U.S.C.R then. OwlFancier posted:and I see very little way in which it can be proletarian. It is simply another form of oligarchy, whereby adherence to the prevailing ideology determines one's fitness to rule over others. That ideology may be socialist for a time but it is unlikely to remain so, and it is unlikely to progress past that. You can't dictate socialism from a minority government, because it will be assailed from all sides by dissent. Here is something that will help you with this problem: http://www.massline.info/sum1p.htm No socialist state has ever had a "minority government" in any sense by the way, both the USSR and China for example were very heavily into getting as many people as possible into political life. That's generally how they achieved everything they set out to do. That's how you transform one society into another. You should at least have heard of things like the cultural revolution or the collective farms movement, even if you've only heard of them negatively. Why you gotta act like a know it all when you just got here? Why do you insist, despite repeatedly having things explained to you, that your idea of Marxism is correct? You subscribe entirely to liberal definitions of "authoritarianism", "Military dictatorship", " democratic revolution", not Marxist ones. You deny basic Marxist knowledge of the nature of revolutions, the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat, etc even to the degree you ignore famous and well known historical events - some of which your knowledge comes from poo poo on the anti-communist side of the cold war, and more that is older than it, so you have no excuse. This whole argument started because you were comically wrong about the marxist conception of a revolution. I showed you that you were wrong. I literally put Engels writing on the matter in front of you. But you persist. All that you had to do was go "oh, I was mistaken. That clears it up", and it'd be over. I get the feeling you only just got an interest in Marx. That's okay. Everyone is new at first. But you cannot be a Marxist if you can't accept being proven wrong. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Feb 10, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 00:39
|
|
|
quickly posted:This actually isn't true: Marx's analysis isn't predicated on endless economic growth. There is a famous section in Capital (Chapter 15.10) in which Marx discusses the ecological impact of capitalist agriculture: Point being, capitalist societies can easily exploit all easily available resources, cause it's own collapse and leaving scraps left for the future [edit] why would a communist society emerge from a collapsing industrial capitalist one, if the reason for that collapse is an immediate and permanent lack of basic resources? Nosfereefer fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Feb 10, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 01:20
|
|
|
site posted:VIL People's relations to the systems of production are just that - their basic role in the enormous machine that is a society. So, for instance, the simplified feudal serf that I mentioned is bound to the land through his serfdom. He is "owned" by a noble, whose role in the economy is to be a sort of military/enforcement/management hybrid. These people's livelihoods and roles are defined by their functions in the dominant mode of production. So you'll get an industrial proletariat with low education and little pay, whose only strength is in numbers - and they will have these features because those are the logical consequences of their role in the capitalist system of production. So, by their nature, their lives kind of suck under capitalism - and as they realise that not only does it suck, it doesn't have to suck, they will take steps to rectify that. Industrial labour, by its nature, is collective and disciplinary, so you suddenly have droves of angry people with "nothing to lose but their chains" who are capable of organising and making collective decisions, which they act out. The bourgeoisie, in contrast, are the great individualists of class relations, as their only function as a class is to amass capital to their person through investment and re-investment. They hold the state apparatus (which, to Marx, is by definition the oppressive machinery of control in a society), but their position is inherently untenable, as the more they squeeze the proletariat (as they will, because that's lucrative), the more pissed off the proletariat is going to be. You'll note that many of these terms are relatively diffuse in today's western societies, in the wake of "de-industrialisation". Marxist theorists have a bunch of ideas on this, the most influential being Lenin's theory of imperialism as the highest form of capitalism. Lenin is actually a very entertaining and accessible writer, so you may want to find his writing on this subject (called Imperialism: The highest form of capitalism) which is somewhere on the web. Marx's more disappointing notions included a depressing personal chauvinism (though to be fair he was explicitly in favour of equality between genders). some of his to us more outlandish ideas are things like the complete dissolution of the family unit as a social entity - he believed that children should be collectively reared, in order to minimise inheritance of class and social prejudice. Concrete consequences of this position are actually still felt today in my country, with the previous red-green government successfully implementing a kindergarten mandate, meaning that all children must have an accessible kindergarten spot. Really, just read the Communist Manifesto, it's got some wonderfully anachronistic policies The Asiatic mode of production is not generally recognised as a good idea. It just, uh isn't Exploitation is, putting it simply, the extraction of value from a worker by means of capital. This ties into a lot of Marx's economic theory, but suffice it to say that Marx was a proponent (arguably the most famous proponent, at least for how important it is) of the Labour Theory of Value. This means that what determines the price of an object in free-market conditions is the sum of socially necessary labour-time involved in its production. So if you have a gem, you need to pay someone to unearth it, someone is paid to make the pickaxe or w/e that was used to unearth it, someone needs to cut it, refine it, clean it and so on and so forth. Each of these steps of refinement adds value to a commodity, which is the main determinant of its price under normal conditions. Exploitation, to Marx, means that the value added by the worker is systematically going to be less than the worker's compensation for the activity. This is representable as e.g. V(c)>V(r). If you think about it, this is necessary; no firm wants someone unprofitable on its payroll, but it also means that the guy owning the equipment and infrastructure is able to levy what amounts to a "work tax" on his workers. And, the reasoning goes, the workers could just take that stuff for themselves - who's going to stop them? For the last point: not today. it's a big topic and it's pretty late. Suffice it to say that once the proletariat is the dominant class, they have nobody to exploit and so have no real reason to pursue anything but militant egalitarianism, full employment and possibly screwing over the peasants once their threats are dealt with. This is what Marx means when he talks about society moving from the governing of men to the administration of things - as the proletariat's position is secured, it will no longer need the repressive state apparatus and that aspect of the state (which is, to Marx, basically all that the state really is) will "wither away". It also necessitates a fairly hefty degree of internationalism and solidarity in labour movements, since if capitalism is still a Thing you need a state for various other functions, and the state is a pretty dangerous tool.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 02:39
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:How does it derive from Hegel's ideas exactly then? The whole point of Hegel is idealism, if Marx isn't an idealist then how is he a Hegelian? Well after Hegel dies there's a split between his students, you had the Right Hegelians who tracked very close to Hegel himself and you had the Left Hegelians who agreed with his vision but saw it as too narrow. In the end the Left Hegelians won that augment especially since most people can't name any of the Right Hegelians and well Marx is the most famous of the Left ones. Or that's a super basic understanding
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 02:58
|
|
|
Horselord I simply don't agree with you. I also don't necessarily agree with everything Marx or Engels or anyone else says on the matter. I most specifically disagree with the notion that you can seize power by military force, try to indoctrinate as many people as you can into your ideology, and have that be sustainable. I don't suggest that a democratic revolution is at all likely to happen, much as I like the idea of communism I don't see it as being a thing that is ever likely to happen and I don't see any evidence to suggest it would be stable if it did. I'm not giving you a viable alternative, I'm telling you why your suggestion is flawed. I don't have a viable alternative and I don't see why what marx described necessarily has to be one. Marx does a good job of describing the conditions of the world, I also think he is correct in that he says that societal change can't be forced, merely that it will occur when conditions necessitate it. I am marxist in the sense that I think marx presents excellent and enduring ideas but that does not in any way require me to believe that communism is likely, or that people who try to institute it through violence and force societal change will have any success. I simply don't see how you can hope to initiate global societal change by seizing power in one country and using the apparatus of the state to compel people to follow an ideology. At best you achieve something like success in one corner of the world, how then do you spread that further when all the rest of the world opposes you? How do you hope to retain ideological purity over the vast span of time it will take to convert everyone? How do you, ultimately, hope to control people's ideas so completely as to carry a single idea over hundreds of years, fighting every inch of the way against the conditions of life which do not yet necessitate that idea across the world. And I don't have a better suggestion for you. All I can say is that if you want an enduring change it must come from a change in everyone's environment. I think marx was 100% correct about that. As bourgeois capitalism emerged because of industrialization, so must whatever succeeds it emerge as the result of the environment rendering Capital impotent. Nobody forced Capitalism to happen, it happened as a result of people willingly embracing industry, and then spread because industry commanded power. Socialism does not command power because nothing has weakened Capital. In the event that the world becomes such that people everywhere want a change enough, then there will be nothing anyone can do to stop a revolution. I expect it will be bloody regardless because things usually are, but it will be democratic. There won't be a need for anyone to enforce an ideology because a new one will emerge because of the conditions we find ourselves in. I'm not a pacifist, if anything I rather like violence, I'm just conscious that it so very rarely does any good. Violence is something everyone can do and allows them to project a disproportionate amount of influence, so it's always tempting to try to use it to effect a change you believe to be right. But it can't truly change society, it doesn't create lasting change. So I have no problem with a violent democratic revolution. Peaceful would be nice but I doubt we'll have the option. Violent resistance to Capital's attempts to deny people the right to self-determine is something I am completely and 100% fine with. What I have issue with is when you need to use force and fear to try to enforce ideological purity against a majority of opposition, because you won't succeed. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Feb 10, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 03:07
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:How does it derive from Hegel's ideas exactly then? The whole point of Hegel is idealism, if Marx isn't an idealist then how is he a Hegelian? Marx said of this that Hegel had the right idea, but it was "the wrong way up", so he put the dialectical thought structure back on its feet, so to speak
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 03:36
|
|
|
HorseLord posted:By the way are you still arguing "as a marxist"? Because uh, guess who came up with the dictatorship of the proletariat? Not Marx. The first explicit definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat was Lenin. Leninism is not Marxism.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 05:02
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I simply don't see how you can hope to initiate global societal change by seizing power in one country and using the apparatus of the state to compel people to follow an ideology. At best you achieve something like success in one corner of the world, how then do you spread that further when all the rest of the world opposes you? How do you hope to retain ideological purity over the vast span of time it will take to convert everyone? How do you, ultimately, hope to control people's ideas so completely as to carry a single idea over hundreds of years, fighting every inch of the way against the conditions of life which do not yet necessitate that idea across the world. I believe Marx would likely support you in this statement. I find it odd that HorseLord clings to the "science" of Marxism, while failing to accept that Stalinism was a failed experiment with horrific global consequences for the proletariat.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 05:08
|
|
|
Dr. Fishopolis posted:Not Marx. The first explicit definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat was Lenin. Leninism is not Marxism. i find this a somewhat tedious argument. lenin was absolutely a marxist, and recognised as such by the marxists of his time. his doctrine, likewise, is clearly rooted in a marxist framework and to marxist ends accusations of blanquism and esotericism notwithstanding, saying that "leninism is not marxism" is only true in the strict sense that there are other marxist ideologies than leninism and the terms are thus not directly synonymous i mean i think i get what you're trying to do here, which is rescue an alternate tradition from what you consider a bit of a perversion, but the case that leninism is not a marxism would be very difficult indeed to make
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 05:14
|
|
|
V. Illych L. posted:i find this a somewhat tedious argument. lenin was absolutely a marxist, and recognised as such by the marxists of his time. his doctrine, likewise, is clearly rooted in a marxist framework and to marxist ends I'm not really trying to rescue anything, the OP wants a primer so I'm trying to be as specific as possible. I'm also specifically responding to HorseLord's assertion, which is misleading. Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism are all different schools of thought, that often radically contradict their predecessors on fundamental points. The most important difference here, I think, is that Marx saw the state as a product of class society, and believed that once the proletariat seized power, the government created as a result would not resemble any power structure that had previously existed. Marx's ideal society was not an inversion of class structure, it was the abolition of class structure to create something entirely new. “The working class cannot simply lay hold on the ready made State machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/drafts/ch02.htm#D2s1 Lenin believed in explicit dictatorial rule over a state-imposed socialism by a single leader. "Soviet socialist democracy and individual management and dictatorship are in no way contradictory, and that the will of a class may sometimes be carried out by a dictator, who sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary." https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/mar/29.htm#fw4 The two concepts are diametrically opposed. These distinctions are fundamental, and important.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 06:18
|
|
|
Dr. Fishopolis posted:I'm not really trying to rescue anything, the OP wants a primer so I'm trying to be as specific as possible. I'm also specifically responding to HorseLord's assertion, which is misleading. do you really think that lenin, of all people, was unaware of the emancipatory thrust of marxism talking about leninism as distinct from marxism makes no sense. leninism itself makes very limited sense except as a subset of marxism. this has been widely accepted by everyone since lenin himself, up to and including people like kautsky, zetkin and luxemburg, none of whom had any particular love for lenin's authoritarian tendencies what lenin is discussing is the figure of an empowered manager in a specific time of crisis, i.e. the october revolution and the civil war. this is him justifying a wartime way of doing things - in very many ways, it runs contrary to lenin's own specifications in what must be done and state and revolution. even disregarding this, drawing a sharp distinction or wasting space arguing that leninism is somehow non-marxist due to some esoteric argument is entirely unproductive, as this is a niche view and will only serve to confuse the issue to new learners. democratic centralism has never been widely considered anathema to marxism since it was introduced. any discussion of marxism must necessarily also include a discussion of leninism, simply due to objective historical reasons. it is incontestable that leninism is, at the very least, heavily inspired by marxism, and thus its practice and historical significant represents much value to anyone interested in marxism. so, even granting your point (which i, frankly, find specious at best), discussions of leninism are pertinent to the subject at hand. none of this should be considered an endorsement of horselord's bona-fide stalinism, of course
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 06:31
|
|
|
Plenty of other Marxist or Marxian groups or individuals will claim that Leninism is a perversion of Marxism and not just a development of Marx's thought. Claiming that no one disputes the validity of Lenin's interpretation is disingenuous. Hell, there was a famous Rosa Luxemburg pamphlet that was often translated into English under the title "Leninism or Marxism" in which she directly attacks Lenin's plan for organizing the party along heavily centralist lines. While Luxemburg shared Lenin's belief that socialism ought to avoid federating along regional lines she very specifically attacked Lenin's style of party organization as counter productive and more likely to hurt the party than help it. So while it might be true that most socialists from Lenin's day tended to agree that some kind of "centralism" would be necessary it seems disingenuous to claim that "democratic centralism", as it's understood by Lenin's followers and adherents, is uncontroversial. None of this should be taken as a condemnation or endorsement of Lenin or Luxemburg, but let's do our best to portray the intellectual history as honestly as possible. Lenin's conception of democratic centralism was, and remains, controversial.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 07:07
|
|
|
I'll concede the larger point. I agree that Leninism does not make sense absent Marxism, and I definitely don't mean to perpetuate the typical Western narrative of an unbroken line from Lenin to Stalin to Khrushchev, etc. The reason I underline this distinction in philosophy between Marx and Lenin so boldly is to undermine another typical Western narrative, that Marxism necessarily leads to revolution, to brutal dictatorship, to collapse and then inevitably back to capitalism. The October Revolution and pretty much everything that happened until the end of 1918 was an obviously an exercise in practically applied Marxism, but the civil war and subsequent rise of Stalin is where any resemblance to Marx's observations end. Stalin may have usurped and distorted Lenin's ideals, but Lenin unwittingly set the stage for it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 07:17
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:I second the request for Foucault and Derrida. How does their philosophy relate to that of Hegel, AKA that on which Marx's theory is based? I can't speak much about Derrida, but Foucault's work is only loosely related to Hegel and Marx. It is much more closely aligned with Nietzsche. A key concept of Foucault is 'power' - which is directly inherited from Nietzsche's will to power. Power is essentially the will to dominate others, but no individual ever has control of that power. Foucault's main body of work analyzes the 'history of the present' by looking at the genealogy (another Nietzsche move) over various institutions, most famously the prison system, and how they have create subjects. 'Power' is not something which is wielded by a individual over others, but more of a force that is created over time in a haphazard, chaotic fashion in reaction to greater social-economic trends. For instance, Foucault argues that the rise of the modern prison system did not remove corporal punishment due to being more enlightened or caring, but for the need to define subjects to be subjects fit for modern capitalism. The prison system not only creates the prisoner, which the goal is (presumably) to rehabilitate, but also creates the non-prisoner, or 'normal' person. It also creates the warden, the prison guard, etc. So while we ascribe humanistic reasons for the change, there are deeper reasons and issues for the prison system. I believe he was one of the first to talk about recidivism and how the prison system creates delinquency and does not cure it. He pushed for major reforms in his writing. He also wrote about psychiatry, sex, police, and surveillance in relation to this system This has major implications for epistemology. Much of the 'knowledge' about humanity generated via the social sciences throughout the 20th century was not truth-in-itself, but knowledge used for the purposes of power. Views on morality, behavior, health, military, economy, etc all were deeply shaped by the rapid development of human institutions for the benefit of the state and economic institutions to create subjects of various forms - prisoners, citizens, politicians, workers, neurotics, psychologists, etc. Foucault has great value in academy and philosophy, but I think he has little value to leftist politics. I am presently reading a critique of French philosophy in the 60s by Alain Badiou written recently. His central critique of Focualt (and other writers) is they just obscure the most important issue - the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeois. They are being wise guys. However, Foucault does show that a politics needs to focus on more than just economics. The state has vast apparatus outside of the capitalist system which molds the subject in bizzare ways. It creates narratives that oppress us sexually and mentally. Simply fixing the economic issues may not fix other issues related to the subject. There is probably a deeper schism between Foucault and Marxism that I can't adequately identify, but that is the jist.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 08:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 16:42 |
|
|
Helsing posted:Actually digging into the past will produce all kinds of weird historical incidents like early socialists who thought capital and labour would be natural allies against the aristocracy, or the fact that Karl Marx exchanged friendly correspondences with Abraham Lincoln and was a regular columnist in the Republican Party's most important and influential newspaper of the 1850s and 60s, the New-York Tribune. Helsing, or anyone else. Can you expand on this? What did Lincoln and Marx talk about? What did Marx think about Lincoln? about the American Civil War?
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2016 11:53
|
|
