Comment by jordwest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordwest | Hacker News Reader

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Leninism, Marxism was founded at a time when the labor equation was very different. Back then, generally there was a fixed ratio between labor input and productivity output. So communist ideals were about how to centrally distribute that productivity output while centrally controlling the inputs.

With automation though I think that obsoletes a lot of those ideas. Now there's less and less connection between labor input and productivity output.

We need some new ideas for distributing the fruits of automation - that take into account the productivity improvements thanks to machines, computers and efficiency improvement in general. While at the same time keeping some incentives to make things even more efficient.

I think that can be done within our current system with taxes, socialising things like healthcare and access to food and healthcare (and perhaps something like UBI). No need to completely overhaul the political system, although we could be heading towards that too if things don't change.

Marx spent the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over how capitalism was increasing the productivity of labour to previously unthinkable levels [1].

He explicitly argued that this was what he believed would make communism possible.

So whatever else one thinks about Marx it's clear he did not think in terms of a fixed ratio.

The comparison of Lenin and Marx is also flawed - Marx argued for the dismantling of the state, not a highly centralised state.

In Critique of the Gotha Programme he even pointed to the US as a better model for education (arguing that government-set standards but devolution of control over the actual provision of education was something to aim for) than the SPDs proposed state run education because he disapproved of giving the state control over even that, arguing that it was rather the state which needed to be educated by the public.

And in his work on the Paris Commune he lamented that one of the biggest errors he believed the commune made was to not go further and smash the rest of the state. The focus on centralised planning in the Soviet Union was Stalinist, not even Leninist, and certainly has nothing to do with Marx.

[1] E.g.: "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"

> The comparison of Lenin and Marx is also flawed - Marx argued for the dismantling of the state, not a highly centralised state.

Marx still believed in some sort of state-level synchronisation or command and control - otherwise he knew that you would just have lots of little communes / barracks-communists inefficiently working at cross purposes, e.g. with resource utilisation. But he never spelled out in detail how the central planning function should work - it was in effect an implementation detail. It was in this space of undefined behaviour that Lenin, Stalin and Mao created the totalitarian states that they did.

I think a lot of people forget that there was no actual collaboration between Marx and Lenin and the others. Lenin was only 13 years old when Marx died, ill and in a city on the other side of Europe.

Although there is a mass of academic detail in Marx's works, the communist manifesto itself is very thin in terms of the remedies to the problems it identifies. The 'call to action' part of the manifesto is essentially ten short bullet points, one of which is 'etc etc'.

> I think a lot of people forget that there was no actual collaboration between Marx and Lenin and the others.

Well, I mean, people “forget” because equating Leninism with Marxism served the purposes of both Leninists and Western opponents of Marxism, so it became a common element of propaganda of both the USSR and other authoritarian communist regimes and the capitalist west.

Marx argued the state inherently would cease to serve a purpose and would "wither away" (the term itself is from Engels who argued it was based on Marx writings) once class antagonisms no longer exist, so I don't think there's much basis for the idea he believed in "command and control" other than at most in a transition. Ironically given his authoritarianism, Lenins The State and Revolution is one of the best summaries of Marx' criticism of the state, and even Lenin plaid lip-service to the notion of the withering away of the state to the point of arguing for an eventual society without a state.

The core distinction between Marxists and many forms of Anarchists, as early as during the dispute in the First International between Bukharin and Marx, was their view not on the long term dismantling of the state - where they agreed - but the role of the state in the transition from capitalism to socialism, where the anarchists wanted the state dismantled immediately, while Marx argued the state could serve a role in a transition, itself becoming a tool to execute the changes necessary to change society.

In his works on the Paris Commune he explicitly criticised the Communards for failing to take the next step and destroy the bourgeois state. While that could certainly have been replaced with a proposed federation, a key distinction was that he celebrated the bottom up delegation of authority, which is hardly compatible with "command and control" if any part can withdraw.

As such, libertarian Marxism directly opposed to the very existence of a state became a thing, based in large part on his writings on the Paris Commune.

Marx was writing precisely at the time that the equation shifted to its modern form. A single spinning jenny operator could do the work of eight or more spinners.

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