What was Marx right about?
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> We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:
1. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.
2. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.
3. Read through the book actively, taking notes.
4. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.
5. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.
6. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading.
7. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.
8. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?
9. Decide what you think of the whole.
10. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.
> Follow this process, and your reading becomes active. Then you have the greatest possible chance of learning the books—of thereafter being able to summon up sub-Turing instantiations of the thinkers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes and then running them on your wetware. If you can do that, you can be closer to being as smart as they were. And at the same time you will be aware enough of their weak points and blindnesses that you can be wiser than they were.
Link: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/a-note-on-reading-bi...
Capitalism make no such prescriptions. It doesn't care how you structure your economic relationships, and it doesn't care to manage the outcomes of those economic relationships. Which is why communes exist in capitalist systems. What I don't understand is why more communists don't just collective resources and go live in communes; land is incredibly cheap with pooled resources. Instead we have to have our entire societies constantly bombarded with attempts to restructure them into these dystopian models.
Take a middle class kid who’s never done a real day’s work in their life into a commune and they’ll generally be wanting to go home within a couple days.
Bernie talked about the evil millionaires until he became one and now he’s all about the evil billionaires. He’s fine keeping his own money because “he earned it”, while still advocating for taking money from others. People generally only favor redistribution of the kind that involves stealing from someone else.
Our programmer community is exceedingly well off and could easily solve a large portion of the countries poverty if were redistributed our wealth. If we gave 10-20% to charity like fundamentalist Christians, the 4 million programmers could lift at least 4 million families above the poverty line. Instead, we blame the billionaires and do little to nothing despite our Twitter claims to want to help the disenfranchised.
Yes, but we give 40% to the Federal government who spends trillions to take care of poverty, more so than the 10% tithe ever would amount to, and the problem never gets better. Donate money to the poor? Great idea, but we're _already_ doing that via taxation and wealth redistribution, and no matter how much we do, we're told it's never enough.
Doing something for the love of it, say raising a family, is dismissed in his doctrine which is utterly hell-bent. Or what Arthur Schopenhauer opined:
“ To say that the world has only a physical and not a moral significance is the greatest and most pernicious of all errors, the fundamental blunder, the real perversity of mind and temper; and, at bottom, it is doubtless the tendency which faith personifies as Anti-Christ.” -On Human Nature (https://www.tititudorancea.com/z/arthur_schopenhauer_on_huma...)
"The question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of spirit to nature is the paramount question of the whole of philosophy.... The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature ... comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism." (Marx, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 329.)"
-https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938....
I am quoting directly from the same source and I have firm understanding of the Master-Slave dialectic and draw a very clear connection to Marx's Superstructure.
Are you familiar with Locke or Berkeley? Marxism, quoting verbatim from the Marxist Archive - and from Marx himself - is in direct opposition to an immaterial world which humans occupy. Spirit, by categorical definition in the Western Philosophical Tradition, exists beyond matter. To Marx, man is enslaved to his material conditions which obligates revolution.
If you have to ask then you are, like me, middle class. The working class and the upper class know quite clearly what class they are in and what class others are. In Marxist terminology you would be one of the petit-bourgeoisie, so you do actually fit into his model.
I would recommend reading some Marx, don't worry, you won't turn Communist, just to understand a) where some of these ideas originally come from and b) how what passes for Marxism these days differs and how few self-proclaimed Marxists have ever read it themselves
My understanding of class in Marxism is that there are only two polarities or tendencies in modern society: bourgeoisie and proletariat. The former lives off private profit and the latter lives off selling their basic labor. No one fits cleanly into either, but as history unfolds people's relationships to the economy will tend to develop toward one of those poles.
With stocks, a rental property, and a salaried job in a specialized technical field, you are essentially the modern equivalent of a pre-industrial peasant because you have a certain amount of economic security and guaranteed livelihood. As the rate of profit continues to fall, however, this kind of security will necessarily become inaccessible to the majority of people under the established order, especially on a multi-generational time-scale. This process is called "proletarianization" and the best example of it in our time is the development of the gig economy.
Even a fully-sane intellectual Marxist cannot escape the communities around them that will twist every word to support their preferred derangements. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what Marx may have thought. His name is now synonymous with anything destructive of civilization by its malcontents.
Consider also, at risk of the above, that this situation, applied to both ‘sides’, is probably the best way to prevent a population from engaging in any meaningful consideration of their condition, and especially any discovery of common ground.
"If only Lenin had survived" is a very pervasive idea I believed, but it falls apart when you realize that Stalin's policies were almost all started under Lenin.
Likewise, "They didn't implement it right" falls apart when you realize that they actually had huge buy-in within the country. They started with the ground-level groups and organized up -- just like "real" communists should.
Many other claimed "imperfections" of Soviet Communism seem to be nothing more than fake propaganda to promote a failed, non-theistic religion. The problem is that humans are human. They will do illogical things due to lust, anger, greed, envy, pride, laziness, and gluttony even if those things will lead to destruction on a personal or group level.
A great example was workers being envious of engineers. Those engineers had everything taken not just from them, but even their children were punished for their "success". They were turned into a subservient underclass with the sole purpose of serving the workers (despite the fact that most engineers from pre-Soviet Russia came up from poverty themselves). Adding insult to injury, a completely fake "conspiracy" was generated out of thin air as an excuse to torture and work most of them to death resulting in decades of stagnation and death.
Capitalism at least acknowledges greed and seeks to create checks and balances to power rather than creating new all-powerful entities that become monopolies using "the will of the people" to satisfy their deadly sins.
Communism founds its revolution on promoting envy and greed promoting perceived (or even real) slights until they break out into theft and violence. It should be little wonder that the culture that accompanies this revolution also promotes these attributes to the devolution of society as a whole.
Last I checked, his wife actually helped write the abridged version.
More importantly, Russians by the tens of thousands who survived or lived in those times attest to its accuracy. It's not like this is ancient history. People who lived through the latter part of the system are still alive today and still agree with the contents.
If only Marx hadn't been so against utopian socialism.
Why someone should think that ML communism equals all communism?
Copyright is not a capitalist idea nor are patents. Government choosing winners and losers via regulations is also not capitalist. Every so-called capitalist monopoly in history has either been vastly beneficial to society or was enforced by the government.
Could Microsoft create a non-beneficial monopoly without copyright? Their licensing scheme is entirely dependent on government enforcement. If pricing go too high, another company would move in, reverse the source code, and sell their own. In fact, this motive is so strong that people do this anyway despite the illegal nature of the operation.
Standard Oil is probably the go-to monopoly example, but it lacks intent. Oil prices dropped precipitously due to the economies of scale to the point that profit margins were (and still are) fractions of a cent per gallon (most of the "profit" from the cost of fuel is government taxation). This is a monopoly, but one of convenience and mutual benefit. If they started raising oil prices, another company could form.
The only sound argument to the contrary is exploiting human ignorance. A knowledgeable person can take advantage of a less knowledgeable person, but this issue isn't solved in any other economic system and in fact, becomes worse historically in Communist countries.
If anything, it seems like crashes are inevitable and government intervention has simply made the crashes bigger and longer-lasting.