You are a Marxist – but don't worry
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"Together with the victory of the revolution, though, Marx's fundamental error also became evident. He showed precisely how to overthrow the existing order, but he did not say how matters should proceed thereafter. He simply presumed that with the expropriation of the ruling class, with the fall of political power and the socialization of means of production, the new Jerusalem would be realized. Then, indeed, all contradictions would be resolved, man and the world would finally sort themselves out. Then everything would be able to proceed by itself along the right path, because everything would belong to everyone and all would desire the best for one another. Thus, having accomplished the revolution, Lenin must have realized that the writings of the master gave no indication as to how to proceed. True, Marx had spoken of the interim phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessity which in time would automatically become redundant. This 'intermediate phase' we know all too well, and we also know how it then developed, not ushering in a perfect world, but leaving behind a trail of appalling destruction. Marx not only omitted to work out how this new world would be organized—which should, of course, have been unnecessary. His silence on this matter follows logically from his chosen approach. His error lay deeper. He forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man's freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil. He thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable economic environment."
[1] http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/d...
> His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable economic environment."
That's going to segue (thanks for the spelling check davidw) obviously into some religions thing about the soul or something. And I take issue with having to be redeemed. I do not need to be redeemed.
The idea that humans are not just the product of their environment but have something within them is undoubtedly true; some of our behaviours are learned (from the economy, and from other places), and some are innate/genetic.
Similarly, humans placed in a "favourable economic environment" are not automatically perfect, or even good.
On these points, I agree with him (in spite of being an atheist and ex-Catholic.)
Because the words are in the general sense and I'd like someone to show me why "man", as it was originally phrased, needs any kind of redemption.
Maybe we don't need a tailbone or some troublesome cancer causing genes, but fixing bad genes isn't redemption. It's a judgement-free mechanical fix for a machine, a biological equivalent to the flipping of bits in programming code. I'm not redeeming my code by making it more optimal when I fix a bug. So why would changing our genes be redemption?
Oh, the torment bred in the race,
the grinding scream of death
and the stroke that hits the vein,
the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,
the curse no man can bear.
- Aeschylus, from The Libation Bearers
The goal of humanity is not simply to end up in Heaven, to reach some sort of place. It is not even necessarily the case that we are trying to restore ourselves to the state that Adam and Eve had -- for even they made a mistake at that time, a mistake serious enough to have cosmic ramifications.
So what was the problem? Well we do know of Adam and Eve being cast from Paradise after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But it's not the eating of the apple that begins the story. Rather, it was Adam's reaction to God. When God confronted Adam, Adam did not respond by saying, "Yes, I ate of the tree against Your warning. I'm sorry; please forgive me." He said instead, "The woman which You gave me, she made me eat it." Instead of being accountable for his action, for his own free will, Adam blames not only Eve but his Creator, essentially renouncing his free will. It was this act, that of failing to accept responsibility and instead casting down his neighbor, that led to humanity being cast out from Paradise -- or rather, casting itself out. Adam's action had effects throughout the cosmos, sending everything into disorder and brokenness and death.
So we see that the problem we have is that humans are cruel to one another and to God (and to creation, also). And this cannot be rectified in a way like having a bone fixed or some code swapped, for the problem is inextricably tied up in humanity's free will. So God chose to rectify this in a way that demonstrated not only His divinity, but _perfect humanity_. Christ becomes incarnate in the flesh and demonstrates, Himself, not only what it is to be truly human but that glory which all humanity is intended to receive. St. Athanasius describes this succinctly as: "God became man so that man might become God." This concept is termed theosis.
Theosis is realized in love of God and one's neighbor, actualized through humility. Unlike Adam blaming Eve, Christ, the new Adam, blames Himself. Christ takes up and covers the sin of the world, even on the Cross praying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Christ accounts _only Himself_ as deserving of death, and all as worthy of eternal life. And in this perfect love, even death has no power over Him. Hades (a place of gloom where the dead were consigned; a jail in a sense -- not Hell) cannot contain Him and is destroyed, and those who were bound there by Adam's sin are released. "Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life." It through these actions that all of creation was redeemed.
Yes, that was "redemption" in the past tense. From the Orthodox perspective, redemption has already occurred because Christ has not only rectified the division between God and man, He has given us the tools to experience divine life even now, through humble love of God and neighbor. Christ has given us the perfect example of how to live, He has destroyed death, and through Christ's union with humanity in the Incarnation, descent into Hades, Resurrection, and Ascention, paved the way to become by grace that which God is by nature.
"The powerlessness of Christ has always threatened the powerfulness of the world. And the silence of the cross is the most eloquent sermon about the power of love. Despite what we know in ourselves and whatever we see in our world, the cross proclaims what love can and will achieve. The scandal of the cross is that, in spite of our wrongs and the wrongdoings of our world, God loves us to the point of death." --Fr John Chryssavgis, Light Through Darkness: the Orthodox Tradition
The commonly accepted view in the Catholic West (as opposed to the Catholic/Orthodox East or the Protestant West) is that Original Sin is the privation of sanctifying grace[2] in consequence of the sin of Adam.
In other words, it's not an inherited genetic disturbance; rather, at the moment you were conceived you were lacking in a spiritual quality which God did not gift to you in view of the disobedience of the first parents of the human race.
In any case, this could quickly get far afield from the bounds of an HN-ish discussion, but I did want you to be conscious of the fact that your notion of Original Sin may be unnecessarily limited to what amounts to a caricature.
[1] http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Original_Sin
[2] http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Grace#II._SANCTIFYIN...
But although this "disease model" of sin can sometimes be a useful theological model, as you say, it is most emphatically not a genetic disturbance or a true disease in the medical sense of the word.
[1] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2...
I'm not advocating for Christian theology at all, but it would be foolish not to see the Universalist connections between Marxism and Christianity, they both have a vision for the "end of history".
So even if the Pope weren't engaging Marx on his own terms here, speaking plainly of a Materialist redemption, which it appears he is doing, his Christian theology would presuppose a good deal of shared understanding in Marx's hope for Utopia. The Church has a love-hate relationship with Communism that needs to be understood before their analysis of it can be cast by the wayside so easily.
Well, you most certainly can change your mind by reading writings, and that is the most important aspect of every human being, worth investigating further .. at all costs.
Marx thought you did. He thought you needed redeemed from an evil, oppressive economic system. He thought that, by doing so, everything would become wonderful. The point of the quoted words was not that you need to be spiritually redeeded, but that Marx's idea of redemption didn't work because his view of humans was wrong.
And now I take issue with your use of pronouns. Marx never knew me, and neither do you.
But I'm pretty sure you knew that, and were just being difficult.
You mean the Pope -- the leader of the Roman Catholic church -- believes in the Catholic interpretation of the doctrines of grace and of original sin, and bases his world view on them?
I am shocked, literally SHOCKED, to learn this, anonymous internet person who is playing at not understanding the source of the quote in order to launch nit-picky off-topic jabs about religion.
A common misconception is that 'private property' here is to be equated with 'personal property'. Marx and marxists do not believe that personal property should be abolished, or indeed that it makes sense to try and do so.
Generally speaking, the private property that Marx advocated abolishing was private ownership of land and the 'means of production', the latter being a category akin to 'fixed assets'.
Fortunately the rest of the article is pretty good, and shows that the author has actually read Marx a tiny bit. Which makes the presence of the first paragraph even more confusing.
The disconnect between the majority beliefs about Marxism and its actual contents (as well as the beliefs of those who actually follow in Marx's footsteps today) is gigantic. I perfectly understand that the author felt they needed some way to bridge that gap without turning the vast majority of readers away at first sight.
It worked really well on me!
When Marx wrote about alienation he was writing about having no choice but to spend seventy hours a week performing repetitive tasks to order in a factory owned and run for someone else's benefit, not the existential angst generated by musing over whether it would be more fun being an architect than designing ads for garden furniture.
At what point does my laptop go from a piece of machinery that gives me access to HN to a mean of production that could make something like HN?
So if laptops are plentiful, it’s personal property. I feel it’s safe to say that most developers probably have their own laptop. So if I hire a developer to write code on my laptop (which was previously personal property) is it now private property since it’s being used as a means of production?
If so, the true distinction between personal and private property is intent which is far from satisfactory if we're defining property. So many things I own today would constantly be switching between personal and private property based on what I was trying to accomplish at that moment in time.
Whether an actual communist society would organise housing like this isn't clear. No-one would reasonably consider Marx's writings to offer a societal blueprint, just principles from which actual details would be worked out through collective processes.
That it's never actually worked out like that suggests there's been something missing when this has been tried, but this doesn't correspond to proof that the principles themselves are wrong.
If it helps, software in that world is not scarce either. It's freely shared because there's no copyright or license agreements. They'd be antithetical to that world's view.
Now, if you're taking the stance of a determined skeptic, then that's like you pointing out there's no such definition of "chair". Which after all is true. (There's no predicate which separates all objects into chair and not-chair, and a simple argument demonstrates why.) Humans get by pretty well without extreme definitions.
Presumably without the antagonisms inherent in systems like capitalism, there'd be fewer armies of lawyers squabbling over the meanings of simple words like "property", inventing weird new forms like intellectual property, fighting over whether that land or sourcecode is my property, if you can shoot someone on your property, etc. We're constantly squabbling over it right now, because that's how power works under capitalism.
s/real goods/scarce items/g
But HN is a scarce item in another sense. If I wanted to make another one, I'd have to not only code it up, but also attract the readers that HN currently has. That would be difficult.
Point being, purely private intellectual property rights exist, but usually only to the degree that they are enforced by private organizations or the societies they belong to.
In fact, they'd probably get so efficient at collecting the money from those without significant resources to spend on defence they wouldn't look too hard to see if copyright had actually been violated before sending their royalty demands. It would be like the current legal system, but with more pointed weapons.
The pipe dream of "truly free market" shares one property of communism: that of being so egregiously flawed in theory as to be impossible in practice.
Property is a privilege protected by government to exclude other people from some set of actions with regard to some particular subject matter. Sure, that's true of copyright and other intellectual property, and intangible personal property more generally, but its equally true of tangible personal property and real property, as well.
> Without the government close by, individuals or businesses would not have the power to enforce whatever it is they're trying to protect.
That's true of pretty much all property but the smallest stores of tangible personal property.
> In a truly free market, copyright would not exist.
The definition of a "truly free market" is generally underspecified and seems to adapt to whatever is convenient to a "free market" advocates current argumentative position.
[Edit: the intuition is capacity to oppress — the state or capitalists controlling means of production, in Soviet communism and capitalism, respectively. This is the motivating factor behind any such definition, given the context.]
Private property laptop: Someone else uses the laptop to perform work. You retain ownership of the laptop and the product of their labor.
It's a use distinction.
Anyway, once you abolish private property, most versions of 'working for someone else' go too, so this is somewhat academic.
>once you abolish private property, most versions of 'working for someone else' go too
How so?
'Working for someone else' as found in 'employment' is also something that marxists seek to abolish. Collective ownership of the means of production also means collective ownership of the product of labour. You only have 'employment' per se when ownership of capital is concentrated in private hands.
(It's not for nothing that many marxists classify the former soviet union and post-Mao china as 'state capitalist' rather than 'socialist').
This probably is very related to how much nicer programming jobs are than most other jobs--as a programmer you are much less affected by capitalism than workers in capital-intensive industries are. I remember reading a pamphlet about the micro-computer revolution published by some British communist organization in the early 1980s. They analyzed programming as belonging to Marx' category of pre-industrial "craft" production, and predicted that there would be a push from employers to gain more control (by reducing programming to a less personalized, more commoditized activity).
I think several trends can be fruitfully analyzed from this point of view, e.g. UML-style software engineering methodologies, cloud computing, DRM, and app stores.
I think it's important to differentiate them. Marx wasn't a religious prophet, you can take the good stuff and leave out the bad. Even he said in his later life that his goals could be achieved by democratic means.
So I don't think it's quite right to say that "Marx and marxists do not believe that personal property should be abolished"; although the important thing is to abolish private property, the natural result of that would also be that personal property as we understand it would cease to exist.
I'm sorry, but that's just nuts unless you can point to a society - of any sort anywhere - that contains no anxious people. People are (sometimes) anxious for the same reason deer and mice and all other animals on the planet are anxious: being anxious has survival value.
Suppose we completely solved the need to pay for food and housing; people would be anxious about health care. Suppose we solved that too? People would be anxious about the need for pet health care. Or better housing. Or social validation. Or we'd start inventing brand new threats to be anxious about, like catastrophic global warming or nuclear meltdowns or economic collapse or being hit by a meteor.
We worry because worrying is part of being human.
Worry isn't a binary state. Not being able to pay for your child's health care is more anxiety-inducing than not being able to pay for your gerbil's health care, for the vast majority of people.
Ok, the Pirahã people of Brazil.
Tibet.
That said, the level of anxiety in western society if the no-1 reason of aging.
> Suppose we completely solved the need to pay for food and housing; people would be anxious about health care. Suppose we solved that too? People would be anxious about the need for pet health care.
Hm, you have too many assumptions there. Not that I'm very fond of social sciences but do you have at least one study to support your claim? Otherwise, Newton might get displeased[2].
What you're saying that Maslow[1] was wrong? Maybe his hierarchy should be a square since physiological and self-actualization is one and the same according to your approach.
> We worry because worrying is part of being human.
Of course if my parent is not at home at 23:00 o'clock, I worry. When my parent comes back I stop being worried. It's transitory. I think that in Ethiopia, in Ukraine and large parts of 21'st century world, most people are worried 24/7 though. It's NOT the same.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo
Wrong. Everyone has been anxious about something sometime. Everyone.
I'm basing my claim on the standard findings of happiness research as I understand them - look up "hedonic treadmill" or "happiness set point". People have a core level of happiness. Being anxious from time to time has the value that it makes us act to try to better our condition. We make and do stuff in large part because we are chasing the illusion that if we overcome this one next obstacle we'll then be happy, but whether we succeed or fail, we eventually return to our default level. Marx's claim is based on the false idea that if we just fixed society in various ways then people could be happy all the time. But he's wrong; they can't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
Quote: "The results of this study suggest that regardless of whether the life event is significantly negative or positive, people will generally always return to their happiness baseline". Source: Silver (1982). Coping with an undesirable life event: A study of early reactions to physical disability. Northwestern University.
Lots of them. Of course not all anxiety can be eliminated (e.g "I'm sick, what will happen to me?" etc), but there are societies with much lower levels of anxiety than others.
That's true both in the present (for example in studies were societies self-access their anxiety levels) and in the past (e.g in societies studies by ethnologists). Some tribal societies ethnologists studied could not give less fucks about anything.
When we analyze the statements of others, we more or less always have to interpret their meanings before we begin the analysis. If we're careless about the interpretive step, as you have been, we can convince ourselves that we're responding to what they've said, when we're actually responding to what we think they've meant.
The author has actually asked, "Why are we all so anxious...?" Not just "anxious," but "so anxious." While the author took the extra step to call out the extremity of the anxiety to which s/he was pointing, your analysis would be superficial even if that were omitted. That is to say, you have committed two errors: 1) You have omitted the author's intensifier, and 2) You have equivocated on the term "anxious."
This is a very basic error, and one for which you should be personally ashamed to have made; Your entire analysis is predicated on ignoring the Principle of Charity, a rule of thumb which is in place to ensure that we all participate at least minimally well in conversations by ensuring that we at least have a shot at understanding those to whom we respond, and those statements about which we are alleging we have knowledge and something of import to say. In short, you have not done your homework. (Not to mention the compounding error of asserting a false dichotomy.)
A final explanation and exhortation to caution: While words have definitions, it is their meanings upon which useful discussion operates. "Anxious," in isolation, might be defined as "nervous about possible adverse outcomes," but the word was not used in isolation. It was contextualized in an utterance about the particular anxiety about the loss of livelihood--predicated on the very real perception of profound expendability--of people in a capitalist system. If you would still care to play, still care to participate in the discussion in a meaningful way, you will take another crack at your analysis that actually addresses whether or not systems that are arranged for the benefit of capital, rather than for human beings, actually create more existential anxiety than systems that are arranged for the benefit of people.
I hope this helps. Cheers.
Besides that, I find shaming people for their reading comprehension to be a cure worse than the disease.
Also, it seems to me that you're only against explicit shaming, as your closing remarks, situating my behavior as worse than the disease, is obviously, if impotently, meant to shame me implicitly. I hear your criticism, and I want to make very clear to you that I reject it on its schoolmarmy face.
That said, I hope your involvement in discussion on HN develops into something that interests me and other interesting people here, despite the lack of promise shown so far. Thank you for the downvote!
In that case, my answer is: because we are each on our own hedonic treadmill, and that particular level of anxiety is what evolution handed us. Whatever level it is, it probably has some survival value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
Though I think the real problem in our conversation here might be that I live in an allegedly "capitalist" society and I'm not particularly anxious, so when I read text like "why are we all so anxious" I have to come up with a meaning for that sentence that isn't immediately false on the face of it.
Are you "extremely anxious", such that the term "so anxious" applies to you? Do you assume it applies to everybody else too? This isn't a rhetorical question; I'm honestly curious: do you think people in capitalist societies have an extreme form of anxiety and people in more socialist ones don't? If so, that strikes me as an extraordinary claim; I'd like to see some sort of evidence for it.
Let's try situating "anxiety" within the context of how Marx would have viewed it. That is, how would the term "anxiety" arise in a discussion of class dynamics in a capitalist system? (This was one of the main concerns of Marx's work.) In that context, it shouldn't take too long to see that the term "anxiety" is going to arise from discussions about exploitation. Namely, the means by which concentrated capital exploits labor is by threatening labor with explicit physical violence and the implicit violence of removing from sectors of the labor market the ability to sustain their livelihoods (in punishment for things like striking for wages or for raising grievances, among others).
This is different from the mood of "anxiety," I think you'll (eventually) agree. I mean, the flip side of the Hedonic treadmill is, of course, the "frog in the pot" syndrome. Setting aside the apocryphal origin of the idea, it is just the Hedonic treadmill in the other direction; We accommodate to unpleasant or undesirable circumstances when we have to. For example, there used to be an effective Bill of Rights in the United States. There isn't, now. Nobody seems especially down about this from moment to moment, not even people who were especially proud that those protections were in place to begin with. However, even if our collective heartbeats aren't elevated 100% of the time, I think there's still "anxiety" about this. Accommodating to this kind of anxiety doesn't make it go away. We just stop physiologically responding to the stimulus. We still know to not voice criticisms that might sound unpatriotic. We still know not to get too close to Muslims in our communities, for fear of state violence, no matter how sublimated or indirect that violence is. Those behaviors come from accommodating to and normalizing our lives in the face of anxiety.
That's the kind of distinction to which Marx and Marxist analysts are pointing when they talk about "anxiety." That's typically their meaning when they use the term. This is a perfectly ordinary way to use words, and the attempt to subvert it by equivocating on the meaning/definition dichotomy is a feature of folk intellectual pseudo-rhetoric. For example, you have done precisely this with my use of the word "extremity." Let me point out that, again as an example, that my hands and feet are my "extremities," but we don't put pictures of them on sports drinks in order to get people to think that they can adopt the cache of the thrill-seeking activities called "extreme sports." Similarly, in my reply to you, I was using another sense of "extremity" as a near synonym of the phrase "the degree of." My point was not that the anxiety was debilitating to everyday tasks, nor that it had the psychological immediacy of having a gun pointed to your head, nor anything like that. The point, charitably constructed, is that capitalistic systems, insofar as they prioritize the interests of concentrated capital over the livelihoods of the laboring classes, structurally use existential anxiety as a tool for manipulation. Whether or not you are or are not "particularly anxious" in your moment-to-moment emotional experience is entirely beside the point. Are you at a job? What is your motivation for being at that job? If you're asked to do something immoral in that job, won't your thinking on whether or not to obey be influenced by the potential loss of income if you disobey? See? Anxiety.
Maybe you can now see why it's frustrating to have you state that this is "an extraordinary claim." First, the Extraordinary Claim trope, as cemented in folk pseudo-intellectualism, frequently first has to do all this work to construe a perfectly ordinary claim, perfectly ordinary use of terms, as extraordinary, which you have done. Only then can it get to its real purpose, which is to create an imaginary "Burden of Proof," and then shift it to the other conversant, as if that conversant were an opponent. As such, it turns all subtle and involved conversation, all sophisticated power struggles that comprise real conversation, into cheap debates. It suspiciously does so in a way that always flatters the one who offers it. It's a classless debasement of the intellectual life. Second, this trope hides the distinction between definition and meaning so successfully that I'm not sure that, even after my responses to you so far, that you'll be able to usefully use the distinction.
I hope that it's beginning to become clear, though. A richer and more meaningful participation in matters of life and mind await you if you can figure it out.
And I agree, it probably does.
But since I'm not already a Marxist, I don't have any existing framework wherein it makes sense to say things like "concentrated capital exploits labor" much less to discuss how this allegedly happens and how that goes on to create what "Marxist analysts" mean by "anxiety". (I'm not convinced the word "exploit" is even a useful term in this context.)
I would prefer instead frame employment in terms of ordinary economics and say that when any two parties agree on any sort of contract there is likely to be both a producer surplus and a consumer surplus; both sides profit by the exchange. If it made sense to call one of those surpluses "exploitation", you'd have to call the other one that too. It's not one-sided.
Sadly, pseudo-marxists have been spouting this sort of stuff for so long that by now they've polluted the terms "capitalism" and "capitalist"; it might be easier for free-market advocates to give up and start over with a new term (like, say, "free-market advocates") for what economists used to mean by "capitalism" than to keep fighting over it. I'm probably never going to convince you that "capitalism" doesn't "exploit workers" because to you, "exploiting workers" is part of the definition of "capitalism".
When I say something is an extraordinary claim, I merely mean it's a claim that seems intuitively false to me. Since the claim was phrased in a way that didn't seem to exclude my own subjective sense of the world as a source of evidence, I consulted that sense, and found the claim wanting.
In the end, it seems like the title claim of the article - "you are a Marxist" - probably just doesn't apply to me. Maybe it applies to you. Which is fine.
You recently said that conversations are for "finding out"; how exactly does talking down to people and calling them 'tards advance that goal?
(1) Regarding the word "anxious", you wrote: "the word was not used in isolation. It was contextualized in an utterance about the particular anxiety about the loss of livelihood--predicated on the very real perception of profound expendability--of people in a capitalist system."
No, in fact, it was NOT so contextualized. Read it again. Maybe YOU saw it that way because you already had some framework to hang it on, but the original claim was a standalone question, the start of a discussion point, and the first mention of anxiety in the whole piece. It said: "Why are we all so anxious all the time?" That is a question, in English, not written by Marx, so we shouldn't need to bend over backwards to interpret it in some explicitly Marxian context to decide whether it would be a sensible assertion to Marx. What matters is whether it's a sensible assertion to us. If not, then we don't need Marx to explain anything here. My conclusion: it's not true. So maybe the rest of the essay is fine, but that one point is unnecessary.
(2) It takes real chutzpah to claim in the same sentence (a) somebody else has ignored the Principle of Charity, and (b) that this person "should be personally ashamed" to have made "a very basic error". You don't seem to be following your own advice. :-)
I have been giving you way too much credit.
(1) describe some issue/concern workers today have, like "work doesn't seem very meaningful" or "work is too specialized" or "we're all so anxious all the time".
(2) demonstrate how Marxism addresses that issue/concern.
(3) repeat #1 and #2 for a different issue/concern, until done.
The format only WORKS - it only has a prayer of being convincing - if section #1 uses everyday language the way actual people use it. If you let part #1 include weird Marxian terms of art rather than normal English language, the logic fails - it becomes circular.
If you can redefine terms like "anxious" at the start to mean exactly and only what Marx would have meant by the terms, you have failed to make the case this article author is trying to make; you have failed to make a logical connection between the problems real people have today and Marx's analysis that demonstrates "we are all Marxists now". Instead, all you're doing is proving that the problems Marx invented and described/asserted using his own weird language...are indeed described/asserted by Marx. Which demonstrates not that we are Marxists, but that Marxists are Marxist.
The answer is that I've given up on you as a person. The "'tard" quote was from Idiocracy. Right before that remark, the context for that remark, was the doctor telling the patient, "You talk like a fag and you're shit's all retarded." Your comment about my tone was a recapitulation of this sentiment. The reference subverts this in a way that, satisfyingly, you are unable to understand, due to your inability to effectively interpret the written word.
I get it: Your project is solely about reinforcing your own libertarian belief system. In my opinion, from reviewing your comment history and from our interaction, you're so committed to this project, and the belief you are buttressing is so frail to you, that you have to label everyone who mentions Marx as "a Marxist." You had an opportunity to critically engage with the material, and you bypassed it for labeling and cheap shots that sidestepped the issues at hand. You can't see the forest of your ideological blindness for the trees of your picayune and misguided logical nitpicking.
Your situation seems hopeless. You seem quite sad and broken. I hope you get better. But this is the last time I will engage with you until I see what I perceive as some evidence of growth on your part. Until then, I am content that any dissonance that I've caused, any discomfort that I have caused to reach you, might possibly do you some good in 5 or 10 years. Right now, you are just not worth it to me.
I have actually deliberately AVOIDED using the term "Marxist" except in response to you using it. I do this because I'm not sure I understand Marxism and I'm not sufficiently interested in the topic to want to argue over the subtleties of who or what is and isn't considered "Marxist". That's why I went with "Marxian" to unambiguously describe terminology that is "related to Marx and/or Marxists" and "pseudo-marxists" to mean "people who seem motivated by concerns related to Marxism, whether or not they themselves are actually Marxists".
I don't understand why it's so threatening to YOU that ONE point in the original article seemed to miss the mark and make a universal claim that from my point of view doesn't universalize to me or the people I know. Is your worldview so fragile that it can't withstand that? This all seems very odd.
Unlike the Idiocracy context, my comment about your tone was objectively valid; I am positive any jury of my peers would agree. (And apparently did agree by downvoting your response when another corespondent called you on it). ALL you have to do to avoid being perceived as pompous is leave out your usual preamble and meta-commentary. In short, the next time you find yourself writing a response that has this format:
> paragraph #1: "Regarding YOU: Something is wrong with your reasoning abilities and you should be ashamed of thinking the way you do. You made a basic error. You weren't charitable. You're not trying to learn. I'm not surprised you made this elementary mistake. You have not done your homework."
> paragraph #2 "Regarding what you SAID: Here is some actual information and argument that responds directly to your stated concerns, leaving out all ad hominem attacks and attempts to analyze underlying motives"
...just LEAVE OUT that first paragraph. You can still write it if it makes you feel better, but then leave it on the cutting room floor - delete it before you post. All of it. Because even if it were all TRUE, it would still tend to poison the resulting discussion. If you want people to read charitably, lead by example - read charitably yourself.
Oh, well. It's been real...
Being concerned about your pet health care is natural. But anxiety shouldn't be a constant state.
Maybe worrying is a part of being human. But worrying constantly most certainly is not. I'm sure you can recount people in your personal experiences who seem to exhibit no qualities of constant worry. I know I have. If I had my druthers I might use adjectives like grounded, secure, and content to describe these people.
Reminds me of my favorite quote from The Wire:
"We used to make shit in this country; build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket"
But economic growth can't plausibly come from creating ever more things, and the obsession with stuff is crazy talk. Delivering services is definitely the thing a modern economy should aspire to. Leave the making of shit to the robots and other countries, with whom you shouldn't even want to compete. It's just nostalgia.
EDIT: To elaborate on my point, the article mentions the desire for meaningful work. I would guess in the past most physical objects are created to serve a very concrete, real human need. But many services seem to be about coming up with ways to convince people to part with their money, often just creating and then "servicing random desires." So such work might not feel very meaningful at all. Hence, having to work such a job in order to get money for the things we actually need (and are already capable of producing for everyone) feels very artificial.
Of course this is not strictly a property of services. Today we also produce lots of gadgets and widgets and nonsense that aren't in any way relevant to our needs.
This is like the article that bitches about engineers making Snapchat instead of working on Healthcare.gov
There is a massive implication in what you are saying and in that article that stuff like Snapchat is trivial and useless. People forget that being a human being is an emotional experience, and that while we require food, shelter etc., to live, in order to truly live we require much more. Snapchat, gadgets and widgets and nonsense? These are all crucial parts of human emotional existence.
Now I have to admit to owning some gadgets myself, but few of these would I consider crucial to my existence, emotional or not. Very very few of them have any impact on my daily life. And if I could choose to have fewer gadgets but more free time (with less spent on doing things I consider meaningless), I would do so. It would be nicer still if the people around me could make the same choice.
I would argue that our emotional existence could improve if it wasn't a necessity to sell it to each other. It's a cultural and social thing, something you can do in your free time.
Yes they were (as well as for many other reasons).
Imagine a cancer patient hooked up to all the crucial life saving equipment that the engineers who did not choose "frivolity" in their careers built. What is that patient doing? They are on their iPhones, on twitter, on Snapchat etc. And these products are really really making a difference in their lives. In being able to not feel so isolated. Until you've seen something like this happen, it's very easy to dismiss these products as stupid cat picture networks. But sometimes cat picture networks really make people feel better, and that's kind of what it's all about.
I just think people frequently criticize others' non-infrastructure work as "frivolous," forgetting that the point of infrastructure is to support a life that is fun and feels good.
Oh, and not even programming is safe. Programmers spend ridiculous amounts of time working on new tools and languages to automate the repetitive parts of their jobs and increase their expressive power and code reuse.
My theory is that the next giant hit will come to engineers in all areas. Once software gets to the point that it can automate dishwashing, serving, driving, retail and all those other service jobs in a super efficient manner, it will be able to automate engineering without the need for the extra hardware to physically do a job. All they'll need is a set of sensors, computer and a printer to send the construction/design/etc. blueprints to.
When I went to college, the message was 'go to college'. Now, the message is 'go to college to be an engineer'. We've seen how well the flat message of college is going for many, many people with, for all intents and purposes, unmarketable degrees.
It just makes too much sense that this will happen in engineering in the next twenty years. I work at a college now, the swing that direction has started, you watch, I'd put money that I'm right.
He's lamenting what society has become post-1980(ish), in which economic inequality is so high that corruption dominates effort.
I wouldn't get too hung up on physical things. Writing is an act of creation, but the product isn't physical. Same for software, or music, or films or television, theater, and so on. Service occupations from waiter to teacher can be seen as creation of experience, creation of value, creation of potential. Even a political campaign creates an organization, loaded with new associations and connections.
I can see how those acts of creation are distinct from many of the financial games ("...our hand in the next guy's pocket") that make headlines, games which don't seem to create anything at all.
I didn't even see that show, but I think I understand what the quote must have meant in context.
Making profit and serving your fellow man are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are more likely to be mutually inclusive.
The idea that people are being forced out of inherently fulfilling object-manufacturing jobs into inherently unsatisfying service jobs isn't particularly true, and even if it were, that's not what alienation means. While many service jobs suck in ways Marx can be applied to, mass production was the original alienating job.
It's the lack of agency that's alienating, not the transitory nature of the produced work, or even the job being inherently pointless (people cheerfully do non-productive things all day)
The part about specialization is questionable as well. While there's not much use for a casual architect, the modern, deep-specialization economy means it's impossible to hire if you limit your search to people who made the life decision at 12 that they wanted to be an packaging technology specialist.
This creates a system where it is not just acceptable but expected that individuals will have various careers throughout life: What we do for a living can't be a fundamental characteristic of our identity if it isn't what we were doing a decade ago and isn't what we're likely to be doing a decade from now.
This is kind of a problem for the article author's defense of Marx because it's the alienating, interchangeable nature of 21st century work that allows the individual to increasingly have an existence outside of their job. Just look at all the weirdos over at tumblr: many of these people have jobs that are so non-identifying that they have to get together and brainstorm new identities to label themselves with.
Cherry-picking that example, no, but I can cherry-pick counterexamples that at least practically require early specialization: professional athlete, medical doctor, admiral, and politician. Many of these specialized professions are not coincidentally highly compensated.
Without getting caught up in details, I think it's fair to say some career paths are also lifestyles and the result of years (or decades even) of goal-oriented career choices.
But you're right that there's more choice than the article lets on. If career variety is important to you, there are career paths that allow a lot of it (like entrepreneurship, software engineering, and business management).
> at its best, labour offers us a chance to externalise what's good inside us (let's say, our creativity, our rigour, our logic), and to give it a stable, enduring form in some sort of object or service independent of us.
Note "object or service".
I don't think that's accurate. Marxists want to abolish private property of the means of production. So it's OK to have a house and car for your own use, but not a factory where others work for you - because in such circumstances, Marx thought, exploitation and dehumanization become inevitable. I'm not saying I agree with this analysis, but in a world where Silicon Valley executives conspire to depress wages and many people are stuck in "bullshit jobs" it can't be completely disregarded either.
Marxism is system that only makes sense at the very highest of levels (like the factory), but completely breaks down when looking at any kind of real implementation.
Unlike computer science, where all levels of abstraction ultimately derive from a solid base of boolean logic, there simply is no base to Marxism/Socialism/Communism/Anarchism.
Yes, many means of production can be used by the owner as well but I don't think that makes the concept unclear. Marx only objects when you benefit from other people working for you and using it.
Is someone going to arrest me?
The proponents of it claim it would be a stateless society, but that clearly isn't true if they have the power to stop me.
The simple, though not only possible, solution is that that doing the work itself, at least with the consent of the tool owner, entitles them to the value produced, and that contracts to the contrary have no effect to change that.
> Is someone going to arrest me?
That's a possible approach, too.
> The proponents of it claim it would be a stateless society
Marx, and some Marxists, claim that the adoption of their preferred policies would lead to the "withering away" of the State, but not that the policies themselves would equate to the absence of the State.
There's other possibilities for "the workers owning the means of production" that don't necessarily involve the state owning the means of production. You can have the workers who do the actual work at the plant own the means of production, instead.
Setting up a dichotomy between top-down heirarchial capitalism and top-down heirarchial statism implicitly ignores any possible middle paths.
"workers who do the actual work at the plant own the means of production"
This cuts right to the heart of my original comment. That is a very broad model that simply doesn't apply to most workers, and numbers of whom grow smaller ever year. Marxism is an obsolete idea based on a world that hasn't existed for almost a century now.
Arguably, "top-down heirarchical capitalism" and "top-down heirarchical statism" aren't polar opposites, they're more adjacent neighbors -- there's a reason that many non-Leninist Marxist call Soviet-style Communism "state capitalism".
"No True Scotsman"?
I'm not trying to say that's all that it is, just that it's certainly a potential explanation.
Essentially, in this approach:
Its not generally a problem for a person to own a tool, etc., and apply their own labor to it to produce value; there is no alienation there.
Its likewise not generally a problem for a group of people to collectively own productive resources and apply their own labor to those resource to produce value which they share collectively.
It is a problem for a person, or group of persons, to own property and rent labor from other people that are not part the owners of the property which is applied to that property to return value which is controlled by the property owner, with only a rental fee going to the suppliers of labor.
It may be a solution to the above problem for the State, as a collective of the whole society, to own certain large-scale productive resources to which workers apply labor to produce value. However, this arrangement has dangers -- particularly, it has the danger of exactly reproducing the problems of capitalism which socialism is intended to address, with the entrenched authorities of the State acting in the place capitalists. (This is, incidentally, the "State Capitalism" critique of certain real-world systems, notably Soviet-style Communism, from socialist critics of those systems.)
(There are other issues with capitalist-style property rules from a Marxist-inspired socialist viewpoint, particularly with unrestricted heritability.)
Stepping outside theory for a bit, I'll note "worker cooperatives" exist and are pretty interesting. They don't tend to exist in hugely capital-intensive industries, though (so far as I'm aware).
When talking about economic systems it's wise to classify property in three groups:
1. Personal property
2. Private property
3. Public property
I know most people, especially in a neo-liberal western society, would never give this a chance, but IMHO it's really life-changing. As scarcity is a virtue and many people still believe that worker's productivity in the secondary and primary economy sector is still of importance.
ps. I'm all for free-lancers working 24/7 if they choose too. But for things housing/food/clothes/energy/internet/etc. 3 hours per 5 days a week should be enough all over our planet.
At my market wage rate, I absolutely could get housing/food/clothes/energy/internet working 15 hours a week. But:
- What I could get would not be nearly as nice as what I get for working anywhere between 2-4x that per week, which is a tradeoff I am happy to make.
- If culture or law made it impossible for me to work more than 15 hours a week, my contributions to society would be immensely curtailed. I do what I do because I'm damned good at it, and what I produce is of value to others (who pay a fair price for it). If I started writing poetry or running more marathons, I might produce some things for society I would not have produced otherwise, but in the aggregate society would lose out.
If a 15 hour work week became mandatory, unemployment might drop, and wages for those limited hours would likely rise, but the overall size of the productive economy would be horrifyingly reduced.
Nope. It's 3 hours per day, per worker. And when I saw worker I mean the lowest paid salary in an economy. So if you wanna keep an shop open 24/7 you might want to employ more workers or pay the long hours.
I get you are in the IT sector which pays above the lowest established salary.
However, my reasoning above, was about whoever choses to do so. Today you don't get that choice, you're either up or down. I'm with, doesn't cut for me... But I reckon that a society which doesn't give that choice to the 90% of it's population will have to face some level of social unrest. So since, we have the technology, and work equals food, we need to at least make sure that people have food with a minimal effort.
ps. Think about a mother with 2 children that needs only to round up the house income. Three hours per day is good, while the husband could work for more...
Actually no. USSR and the "really existing socialism" states had little to do with the theories of Karl Marx (besides the basic lip service paid to it).
If you want to discredit Marx's theories do it based on what HE wrote (that's his theories), not what others did afterwards.
And arguments from economists that work as policy makers (instead of as objective scientists) and whose models and proposed policies have failed historically in every single case they were enforced do not count much.
Even in theory (leaving aside practice) there is a pretty big divergence both in the approach prescribed by and prerequisites/target environment addressed by Leninism from that of Marxism. Leninism was by its own terms, a system that sought to acheive the goals of Marxism, but adapted the means to an environment which had not yet met the conditions Marx saw as essential. Marx wrote about problems in the developed world of his time, and approaches to correct them that built on the present condition of society in those developed countries. Lenin sought to adapt that to address the conditions in a far less developed country bypassing the kind of economic and social development which Marx saw as setting the stage for the change he proposed.
You can't fairly criticize Marxist theory based on Leninist theory or practice.
That article is misleading and tendentious in many ways. I was going to write a post debunking it, but I honestly didn't manage to get to the end. I found it's just not worth getting worked up ("Someone's wrong on the Internet!"). Just some short ideas:
- The author seems hung up on one aspect of Marx's thinking, the concept of alienation. While it is an important concept for Marx, I think if you just single out one aspect, you risk making a similar mistake to the Marxists (who emphasized the expropriation of workers' surplus value, and the need to get control over that surplus through class war).
- People who most vocally criticize Marx usually haven't read him. I'm no fan of the Soviet Union, but Marx doesn't advocate a state like that. His main opus, the Kapital, is a theory of Captialism, not of Communism. Most economists and many other academics don't use Marx nowadays, but not because he is wrong per se, but rather because his work-value theory does not have much quantitative predictive power. You can't use it to calculate much, but that wasn't his goal anyway. Rather, (as I'd describe it in modern terms) he shows how from simple axioms you automatically get all the injustice and crisis-proneness he criticizes in capitalism (a la: Assume there's a society where most people work, get paid wages, and buy the products of their labor on a open market.... BAM people who own the means of production get richer, etc.). I personally was really surprised how relevant his writings still are today.
There are many things that were later called Marxism, some of which Marx did advocate, some of which he didn't (and, in the latter case, some of them are arguably well-grounded in what Marx did specifically advocate and many of them are directly opposed to what Marx advocated.)
> In fact, he famously said "je ne suis pas un marxiste" - "I am not a Marxist!".
Actually, he wrote to a particular set of French "marxists" who had diverged from his approach on a program for the particular situation in France on which he had collaborated with them, that if their view was "Marxism", then "what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist".
The context and condition are almost invariably left off by people who want to claim that Marx rejected Marxism generally.
The superficial resemblance to the daily mail leads me to instantly discredit the whole site.
The reference to the Daily Mail is relatively simple. This website obsesses over the same culture, but for an entirely different purpose. As far as I can tell, it's not supposed to be an ironic publication, like the Onion or something. And I don't think they are making fun of the daily mail necessarily
I think one reason for using the DM's form is to highlight how empty the content of a online newspaper is, when compared to something thoughtful dressed up in the same design.
I was given to understand he didn't believe this at all! He believed that people should not be allowed to own the means of production. He was fine with people owning e.g. toothbrushes.
I think his idea is that if private property were abolished, the means of production would not be owned.
Is Platoo demented too??? And if Platoo is demented, who is not demented? Von Mises, Hayek, Friedman and Thatcher?
There were already abundant answers to the problems that Marx was witnessing, but rather than celebrate the liberty of the individual, Marx subjugated every individual to the limitless needs and exigencies of the "masses".
Great, so a few of Marx's tenets out of context of his larger theme made some sense. His context, though, was completely screwed up.
No, there weren't then and there aren't now. And, the answers that were later adopted, in the US and the rest of the developed West, to partially mitigate the problems Marx was witnessing were, in large part, a subset of those Marx and Engels recommended in the Communist Manifesto as first steps. (And the Enlightenment preceded the development of the economic system that Marx was criticizing -- and contributed to it -- it didn't solve it.)
To what "first steps" are you referring?
Marx also had many insights into modern society, human psychology, and history. Not all of his insights were incorrect - indeed there are precious few humans who are cursed with uniformly incorrect insights. However, agreeing with some of Marx's insights does not make you a Marxist.
This is the converse of "Hitler was a vegetarian, therefore vegetarianism is evil" fallacy.
No. that's just straight wrong. Property is revenue generating, it's not the stuff you own. Marx wanted to abolish private ownership of the means of production (ie, factories)
But there is no growth without risk, and especially Mao has been guilty of all sorts of bad ideas "tried out" on a grand scale, ignoring risks and just aiming for the newest get-wealthy-quick scheme. That's why China today is extremely conscious about their growth. Not too high, not too low.
The only way to achieve this risk-managed growth is through a large and lucrative financial sector.
Why some people insist on referring to all leftist critiques of the status quo/capitalism as Marxism and then complain about the intellectual babbage attached to that term is beyond me.
What a laughable article.
Unless you're trying to test the statement "because they make things they're Marxists", in which case I have no answer.
Marx had very little interest in discussing property or things. He called focus on property and things "commodity fetishism". Marx talked about relations of production - relations between people.
> It's going to war with human behaviour.
All humans lived communistically from the time of cave paintings, Venus figurines, advanced tools etc. of 50,000 years ago, to 10,000 years ago.
Go back to the time of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE - Japan, Australia, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa etc. are all still communistic hunter-gatherer tribes. People in New Guinea were living in a more "advanced" mode of production then people living 200 kilometers north of modern Stockholm.
If there was some genetic component of humans which made the recognition of rented property, interest-lended money, profit-extracting capital etc. some innate human feature, then we wouldn't have to be repeatedly told that how production and relations of production organized themselves in the past two centuries is normal, and any changes to that are "against human nature". Unquestionable, repeated, "accepted wisdom" of man's nature has been part of propaganda models for millennia - centuries ago priests and reverends would be telling us it is obvious man is depraved, man is sinful, only saved by the grace of god etc. When considered, it's obviously nonsense.
Like the OP, I don't buy into Marx's solution. I don't claim to know how to build the perfect society, because the feedback cycle takes too long and the costs of experimentation are very high. He diagnosed the problem perfectly. Greed is what is (at least, at risk of) killing us and the planet.
Artificial scarcity is also a cause of much misery, and I agree that it must be struck down. The modern, technological world has no place for these artificial scarcities. I probably sound repetitive when I rail against closed allocation, but that's a perfect example of an artificial scarcity (in that case, of ways for a person to distinguish herself and succeed) in all its moronic and evil glory.
If you are going to get that general, why not say the core problem is that we live in a universe where the core biological law is natural selection/survival of the fittest? Ultimately, every biological entity survives and reproduces by either growing the pie or stealing more of the pie. Human beings became dominant in part because the big brains allowed for cooperation in growing the pie, rather than just fighting each other for resources. Unfortunately, our brains are limited and this did not scale beyond the Dunbar number. The invention of rule or law and market economies helped scale this even further, as these innovations made it so that you had to create some value to exchange, rather than just stealing. But the success of those innovations just allowed the species to grow even more numerous, and the systems far, far more complex, and so market economies have broken down as so many people have found it more profitable to game the system than to create real value (gaming the system meaning everything from exploiting arcane financial structures, lobbying for government favors, building web apps to exploit natural monopoly opportunities, etc.)
What is the solution? My best take is that we need to refactor our laws, legal system, and financial system in order to eliminate the opportunities for complexity exploitation, and to re-incentivize value creating activities (such as basic R&D).
There are many countries that have realized this, and have implemented capitalism's competitive force in a controlled, positive sum manner while simultaneously leaving a generous safety net for those getting started or recovering from failure.
However, I believe that in the past few decades, modern nations have had no guiding principles other than economic growth. This begets a huge host of problems, mainly resulting from parasitic and wasteful economic practices which tend to be zero or negative sum when all externalities are accounted for.
If we look closely at history, our guiding principles have always been based on fear in the form of massive wars, whether waged or theoretical (WWI, WWII, Cold War, etc.). Increasingly I've become convinced that in order to address all of the failings of modern societies, we need to have national principles based upon something other than pure economic performance and/or war.
I sincerely hope that someday, modern nations will adopt scientific research as their guiding principle, and structure society around the continuous quest for knowledge. Research would be the economic engine that drives growth, and national spending would be based upon catalyzing scientific and technological progress. Professional science would be the developed world's biggest industry, which would facilitate implementations in private industry when technologies mature. Universities, hacker spaces, and all academic institutions would provide a plethora of training opportunities that would be sponsored by national spending, ensuring a citizenry that would be incredibly educated and willing to engage in research at all levels, from lab technicians to principal investigators.
As such, there would always be a job available in the nation's scientific infrastructure for every citizen at some level. The state would be the employer of last resort, but would also allow opportunities for incredible advancement. Furthermore, this would result in an extremely informed voter base, with the time to participate in direct and/or representative democracy.
I see this as being an incredible opportunity going forward. As automation proceeds to rapidly destroy middle and low class jobs, the entire concept of employment will have to be reevaluated. Capital will eclipse labor in the economic factors of production, leading to a necessity for people to find another meaning in life other than just "jobs" for the sake of survival. We'll need a guiding principle to structure our society around.
Thus, I humbly nominate the pursuit of science as our prime directive.
So, in other words, Marxism.
Imagine a society in which the state doesn't feel the urge to "structure society" at all...
Sounds great! So, who is going to build the roads, schools, hospitals, water sanitation, power plants, transportation, and ensure their upkeep and performance without conflicts of interest? Who is going to decide whether you can hire private armies to enforce your will or not? Who is going to make sure that those with power are held accountable to those without?
Please share your thoughts.
As for crime control(such as hiring a violent army, or shoplifting), companies could form unions that will turn down the business of "convicted" criminals. If you steal from a Walmart and you get caught by their union, then Walmart and every other retailer in that union isn't going to sell to you in the future. It's against the personal interests of a company to hire their own private army.
Sounds pretty tame to the actions of the US state, doesn't it?
Thus the private army which fights to free him would be agreed to beforehand.
And presumably Walmart would lose access to some of their markets as a result, and be fined, and/or and/or etc.
Nor the ability to opt out entirely.
Agree with who exactly about those requirements?
The term "jurisdiction" itself implies some governing entity from which to exercise jurisdiction.
I'll assume you mean "the local commune", and when Wal-Mart ignores the rulings of the local commune and opens a shop anyways, what is the commune going to do about it?
Eject them by force you say from the local commune's militia? Wal-Mart will have a bigger army, because they can pay for it.
Eject them by force with a coalition of regional militias perhaps? That might work, but a regional coalition of actors with the right to use force isn't an anarchist commune, it's a government.
For example:
If you've got this one 'government' controlling everything, what happens if it just up and decides to start enslaving tens of thousands of people and sending them to die in horrific trench warfare? Who's going to stop this 'government' from doing that?
What if this 'government' starts outlawing certain plants and/or alcohol, and punishing people harshly for using them? Who's going to stop the 'government' from doing that?
What if this 'government' enacts racially discriminatory laws?
What if...
Don't turn the question around.
And don't forget that the one proposing to change the status quo is the one with the responsibility to prove that their proposed change is better, not simply "just as bad".
As one of those nerds, I'm happy for the state to structure society in a way where my ability to do things with my brain matters than my ability to fight or lead people in fighting. But its foolish to believe that this structure is the natural order of things.
Wisest words I've read so far on HN.
Lenin on the topic:
It was solely against this kind of “abolition” of the state that
Marx fought in refuting the anarchists! He did not at all oppose
the view that the state would disappear when classes disappeared,
or that it would be abolished when classes were abolished. What
he did oppose was the proposition that the workers should renounce
the use of arms, organized violence, that is, the state, which is
to serve to "crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie".
We, humans, feel an almost primal need to structure everything around us, not just those of us who suffer from OCD.
Your imaginary libertarian/anarchistic society is about as realistic as pure Marxism. It denies human nature.
In a free nation, people would be able to organize a Marxist sub society, yes?
This book discusses this problem in depth and suggests some possible solutions:
How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
http://www.amazon.com/How-Much-Enough-Money-Good/dp/15905150...
They explore how the focus on unlimited growth and acquisition as an unquestioned good is a recent phenomenon in human history, and how almost all major philosophical and religious lines of thought throughout history have placed limits on the optimal amount of wealth and possessions to accumulate. They cover the same ground on Marx as this article, but include many other thinkers and systems of thought as well.
One axis is the capitalism-socialism axis, where you have a basic argument about redistribution and the role of wealth.
The other, and for the well-being of the economy much more important axis, is the market economy/planned economy axis. If you harness the power of evolution for you economy, there will be overall success. On the other hand, if all decisions are made in Moscow, things will suck.
Some of the more liveable places on the planet unite market economy and some degree of socialism. The nordic countries come to mind, also France, Germany.
Furthermore, while I do see the value in your proposition, I'd say that the pursuit of science alone has, going by historical precedent, proven to be insufficient. There are just too many examples of people ignoring the catastrophic circumstances that others are put through because of their scientific pursuits. Werner von Braun was justifying his work with the prospect of going to other planets. He probably wasn't happy that the V2 was aimed at London, or that he was utilizing an army of slave workers, but he sure as hell didn't let that stop him.
To be fair, we sorta did.
One way of looking at it is modulating the outcome distribution of the "game". Yeah, games are a great way to test out economic ideas in "competition" with one another, but the outcome distribution maybe should be more shallowly sloped, not a winner-takes-all game.
I do think one important aspect is that the state still does make some planning decisions, especially on infrastructure. The decisions may be implemented with market mechanisms, by putting out a tender for the operating contract. But the state decides which metro lines to build, how much service there should be, what fares should be, etc. The state also centrally manages both the healthcare and university systems as a "single payer", though some degree of internal markets exist within those sectors (especially in the universities).