Yanis Varoufakis: Marx predicted our present crisis – and points the way out | Hacker News Reader

Yanis Varoufakis: Marx predicted our present crisis – and points the way out

theguardian.com

27 pointsehudla20 comments

Here's the bit that resonates with issues often discussed on HN:

"In the manifesto’s unforgettable words: “A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

The sorcerer will always imagine that their apps, search engines, robots and genetically engineered seeds will bring wealth and happiness to all. But, once released into societies divided between wage labourers and owners, these technological marvels will push wages and prices to levels that create low profits for most businesses. It is only big tech, big pharma and the few corporations that command exceptionally large political and economic power over us that truly benefit. If we continue to subscribe to labour contracts between employer and employee, then private property rights will govern and drive capital to inhuman ends. Only by abolishing private ownership of the instruments of mass production and replacing it with a new type of common ownership that works in sync with new technologies, will we lessen inequality and find collective happiness."

So in order to prevent these evil capitalists from ... (god forbid) fulfilling people's wishes ... we should give full power over everything ("the economy" which is everything) to person/committee X (Marx and Engels both saw that democracy and communism are incompatible) who will then "make everyone happy".

Ok ... that sounds like an excellent idea, so long of course, as your wishes and happiness are perfectly served by X.

Also: no thank you.

1. Marx did not really have a substantive first-order normative theory. He would not use the moralising - or indeed, the religious - language of 'evil'. His early humanist writings make clear that the capitalist, as much as the proletariat, is hidebound by the structural constraints of capitalism.

2. It is not at all obvious that capitalism is simply and straightforwardly a system for satisfying people's wishes. For one thing, what people's wishes, interests and desires are, is not independent of the socio-historical system in and through which they have become a person in the first place. It is not something fixed. More generally, it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of 'wishing' independent of the material conditions that shape, as a matter of fact, what one can and cannot wish for. I can wish for economic democracy, but that does not make it so; a destitute proletariat, in Marx's view, can wish for something more than wage labour, but that does not make it so; someone could wish for a society founded on something other than the profit-motive, but that does not make it so. That is not to dismiss the awesome creative power of capitalist modernity - but you have a very naive view if you believe it is merely a mirror-image of the natural wishes of human beings.

3. Marx did not see 'democracy and communism' as 'incompatible'. Marx's view of democracy is significantly more complicated than that. One can find a perfect antidote to your claim in his 1871 essay on the Paris Commune. He defends a system of decentralised, self-governing communes under universal suffrage.

4. Most of the socialist Left since 1956 - when Krushchev revealed the crimes of Stalin to the Party Congress, and when he crushed the Hungary Revolution - has conceived of itself in opposition to the Soviet Union. The New Left (or 'Western Marxism') is highly anti-authoritarian.

Why does the western new left intelligentsia always back authoritarian governments? Castro, Chavez, Maduro, to cite a few, not to mention those who studied under these “highly anti-authoritarian” “intellectuals” like Pol Pot.

That ironic feeling when crony statist capitalists already have complete and total control over the economy

It's just socialism by another name, and with different recipients (namely corporate execs instead of the median human being)

Corporate execs organize companies that deliver value to society ... or they won't be execs for long.

Socialist bureaucrats ... they "justify" their place in society the way the people at the DMV do.

On the contrary, such companies don't deliver value. Their sole purpose is to extract value.

Right? Like Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen, Comcast, Raytheon, just deliver soooooooo much value to the American taxpayer!

Those executive bonuses are hard-earned!

Which means it is comparable to most other forms of socialism as those also tend to have a limited group of privileged individuals versus the unwashed masses who get to be equal in relative poverty, especially compared to the former group.

One has to be really in thrall to an ideology to write " (a manifesto) ... needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom. No manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London."

How about an evidence-based cost/benefit analysis?

Do you really think politics is just a matter of technical analysis? Really?

The problem with these common ownership ideas is that hierarchy is inherent in human structures.

Whether it's labeled 'for the people' or not, you end up with the same distribution of decision makers and benefactors concentrated at the top.

It's not a problem in capitalism but one of humanity or maybe even natural law.

The idea that everything can be bought and sold, for example your feudal estate, is quite new. I think Varoufakis is a somewhat of a disciple of Karl Polanyi on these matters.

But I agree that the notion of "a new type of common ownership that works in sync with new technologies" needs much more spelling out.

I agree that one should not get caught up in utopian fictions in which humans are made pure and good without blemish. But that does not mean that we cannot create institutions, procedures and norms than do a far better job of curbing the worst tendencies in humans that capitalism does.

I think I saw the article a few minutes ago on the first or the second page, and now it's already on the 13th, the last one, the last item. Wow. That's fast. Correction: it's gone from the pages completely as I posted this.

Here is an interesting related tedx talk about the proportion of rich people in Nordic socialist countries https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A9UmdY0E8hU

Here's the bit that resonates with issues often discussed on HN:

"I believe that Marx and Engels would have regretted not anticipating the manifesto’s impact on the communist parties it foreshadowed. They would be kicking themselves that they overlooked the kind of dialectic they loved to analyse: how workers’ states would become increasingly totalitarian in their response to capitalist state aggression, and how, in their response to the fear of communism, these capitalist states would grow increasingly civilized."

I know socialists see this as a critical component to their theories, and I understand why. But the truth is that the Soviet union, and China, both became very extreme totalitarian states ... not because of external aggression, but because they feared the civil war they themselves had used to get to power, before any capitalist aggression really began (long before WWII, and even during). They saw their own power (and with it, communism, at least in their minds) mortally threatened by the very mechanism that gave it birth, and therefore saw extreme measures as justified to prevent that.

I will agree that later on "capitalist" aggression made it worse. Although a significant (and the most complained about) part of capitalist "aggression" by far was accepting refugees from communism, and so perhaps aggression is not always the correct term. Other things weren't nearly so benign.

I would also like to see socialists explain why communist societies became so incredibly more aggressive after communes in the West (which were allowed to exist, in large numbers, where they weren't outright abusive) ... failed of their own accord. I mean, my idea is that they failed because they proved the truth of socialist fears : given free choice of it's members, every society will eliminate communism. Of course, I see history following the Soviet collapse as further reinforcing this idea.

> I know socialists see this as a critical component to their theories, and I understand why. But the truth is that the Soviet union, and China, both became very extreme totalitarian states ... not because of external aggression, but because they feared the civil war they themselves had used to get to power, before any capitalist aggression really began (long before WWII, and even during).

Foreign powers involved themselves in the civil wars in both places, which complicates this claim.

China's civil war in any case took place after World War II (the Nationalist-ruled China could fairly be described as an authoritarian state but I don't know that that helps the case)`.

Is it not the case that the totalitarian societies we place under the flag of “Communist” had not achieved Actual Communism? - that the totalitarianism and the mechanisms which gave birth to the domination of those parties and ideologies were intended as stepping stones to the “Ideal” (which may or many not have come to pass given time and isolation).

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