Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist (2013)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
My personal nadir came at an airport. Some moneyed outfit had invited me to give a keynote speech on the European crisis and had forked out the ludicrous sum necessary to buy me a first-class ticket. On my way back home, tired and with several flights under my belt, I was making my way past the long queue of economy passengers, to get to my gate. Suddenly I noticed, with horror, how easy it was for my mind to be infected with the sense that I was entitled to bypass the hoi polloi. I realised how readily I could forget that which my leftwing mind had always known: that nothing succeeds in reproducing itself better than a false sense of entitlement."
Unfortunate that the most important thought was buried at the bottom.
From: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21639500-being-good-n...
And thus the winners of the system justify our inequality.
B.J. Fogg & C. Nass (1997) Silicon Sycophants: The Effects of Computers that Flatter. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 46(5), pp 551–561.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581996...
And yes, that 10 page paper costs $36. Thank you, Elsevier.
And so the eternal and ever-desperate efforts by intellectuals to figure out how to separate the things they want to hear from the bits of the theory that are wrong. But, alas, I'm pretty sure they're inseparable.
Except that those millions of corpses were not caused by Marx or his theories but by a flawed implementation of it by some power hungry dictators.
In terms of tech, don't blame the spec if you didn't implement it correctly.
But what is more disturbing is that these actions were unapologetically intended to be violent; the lives of "bourgeois" or "kulaks" were considered to matter not at all because of their "class". The ruling ideology was that certain classes were "bloodsuckers" unworthy of life. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin%27s_Hanging_Order
A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea like class to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they're in a certain class is extremely disturbing. It is not clear to me that this was a Bolshevik innovation rather than something that is latent in Marx.
1) It's true that there were uniquely powerful and dominant figures during both the Red Terror and the Collectivization. But those were people who genuinely had the support of the rest of the Party. Many of the other Bolshevik leaders were just as bad. In fact, Trotsky (the alternative on hand who usually plays the "if only the czar knew!" role to wishful leftists) was if anything worse, pushing for an immediate campaign of massive warfare and terrorism to be extended to other countries and being particularly brutal in putting down rebellions.
2) Thinkers trade in abstractions--thought is really just the application and generation of new abstractions. It's not clear to me that you can hold those thinkers responsible, though, when people proclaiming their ideology use their abstractions to ride roughshod over human rights (itself an abstraction...)
Take Adam Smith, who's a secular saint in the Anglosphere. The liberal version of British imperialism embraced him and laissez-faire capitalism to justify actions that cost tens of millions of lives. E.g. the Irish famine, the Indian famines, arguably even the Opium Wars/Taiping Rebellion. A typical argument for not providing famine relief by the Indian Famine Commission:
The doctrine that in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief [...] would probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at all times, and thus the foundation would be laid of a system of general poor relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension.
This variant of capitalist ideology was the deadliest in the world during its time, until variants of Marxism managed to blow that record away. I think you can just as easily say, "A philosophy that reifies an amorphous abstract idea like property rights to the extent that people's lives don't matter if they lack property is extremely disturbing."
It seems to me that the only ideologies out there with clean hands are the ones that only exist in people's heads.
FTR, I think the healthiest approach is to reject all ideologies that pretend to be all-encompassing and use the analytical tools provided by them as needed. Epistemological, if not political, anarchism.
With Marx/Lenin/Stalin, it was class. With capitalists, it was property rights. With Hitler, it was race.
I'd say it's worth fighting for national defense, but not too many other things...
Leninist vanguardism, however much it may borrow language from Marx (mostly about abstract goals) and call itself "Marxist-Leninism" is not, in terms of concrete prescription (or even conditions in which it is designed to operate) anything like Marxism.
> In terms of tech, don't blame the spec if you didn't implement it correctly.
Those implementing Leninism and its descendants were working from a very different spec than Marx's work, not merely poorly implementing the spec.
I disagree.
> The main concrete proposals he had were pretty banal by today's standards, ideas like universal education
Some of them are banal by today's standards because they have been pretty much universally adopted among modern mixed economies (many of which were the developed capitalist societies of Marx's today, to which his prescriptions applied.)
> and he didn't say much about how to get there besides hand-waving revolution.
The concrete proposals like the ones you are talking about in Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto were -- and were expressly stated to be -- the immediate first steps of the "how to get there" (with "there" being the goal state), and each of the concrete proposals was, IIRC, presented in the context of its specific function in moving toward the desired end state.
How do his philosophies flatter? And why specifically intellectuals?
> total nonfuctionality of the rest of his theories
Really? As in, all of his observations about socioeconomic dynamics were wrong?
In a competitive market economy prices fall to the cost required to produce something, right? What if this applies to labor too? Heck, what if there's a way to substituted for labor?
Have you ever felt like what you do doesn't matter? Like you're a cog in a larger machine where you're frustrated that you don't get to make decisions about the craftsmanship of whatever you're working on? Like some kind of ... I don't know... alienation from life?
Despite what this says, there are those who are strictly, to a great fault, at times, principled. And this principle can overcome the problem of flattery.
This is the kind of thing which tends to bite some people at work. Pointing out the warts, short -sightedness, despite the promise of a steady job, some managers can see this as threatening, rather than an awakening. Not everyone caves in to the siren call...
Well a first class ticket costs far more than the economy class and offers more perks. So actually he was entitled to walk past them because he purchased that privilege. And he was able do so even though he wasn't born into aristocracy/nobility.
I'm just concerned that his unorthodox but popular views offer no new insight in how to solve the problem. If so Greece may doom its people to long term relative poverty and drag other countries along with it.
Time will tell. I wish Yanis, Syriza and Greece the best of luck. Things could still turn out OK as economic predictions are very uncertain. However the risks are clearly huge.
Greece is at a critical point. I hope Yanis is thoughtful about risks of his government's aggressive tactics and unorthodox economic views.
Some interesting questions are:
- Do the benefits outweigh risks?
- Are there better alternatives?
- Is there a human nature bias to want strong leaders despite risks?
Never the less, there are good cases for prioritization. Say at a hospital the most critics but with the best chance for survival are prioritized.
And ideology will not get rid of this. If it's not directed by money it gets directed by class or position or favoritism.
So in this case I dont think the solution is to eradicate the behavior, but rather make it more accessible and less tied to a particular privilege.
(Spoiler: I am from the former communist block.)
EDIT: (I hope you don't mind if I reply to everyone here in my original comment.)
Philosophizing on what Marx meant by what he said is lot like Bible-reading study. It is nice to speculate on what God meant when he said "You must kill those who worship another god [Exodus 22:20]" but it is more important to know how those killing in His name understood it. In our context, one look at Syriza's economic programme should end all discussions on what Marx really meant with the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Raising wages, employing more people in the state sector, subventions, subsidies, free healthcare and education along with stiffening the labour market, nationalisation of industries and raising taxes up to 75%. That all obviously sponsored by new loans once they successfully ditch their current debt.
That brings us bak to my original point: there is not a single example of successful Marxist economy, regardless of what part of the Marxist wish-thinking you embrace.
As for prosperity: I think quality of life is significantly worse now (25 years later) in all post-soviet bloc countries outside the EU. Although yes, planned economies are very stifling towards innovation and individual enterprise and apparently cannot compete very well with capitalist economies.
Marx was a critic of capitalism, and did not propose any vision of how society should be constructed beyond "workers should own the means of production" (which, of course, has never been tried as a nation-state level policy, and was not tried in the USSR, Mao's China, etc.).
for more: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_mar...
Marx -- mostly together with Engels -- actually proposed much more specific policy proposals than "workers should own the means of production", in the Communist Manifesto and in other works.
This leaves countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyztan and similars who are barely industrialized yet alone modern. The Soviet empire was all but a thin veil of progress over a third world expanse. This includes Russia, outside of a few metro areas it is as if time stood still.
Marx was very much a political activist (if not a revolutionary in the violent sense), and pretending he wasn't isn't particularly helpful.
Of course, its also not helpful to conflate his political activism with that (including the violent revolutionary aspects) of Leninists and others who sought to use association with Marx's name to sell radically different programs which even rejected the basic required preconditions of Marx's proposed program, even where they adopted some of Marx's language about the basic struggle and desired end state.
I never said he wasn't a political activist - only that the emphasis is definitely misplaced. In popular culture people think communist manifesto and not Capital or the rather large corpus of sociological, historical and economic writings.
If you don't believe humans are willing to "sacrifice that much" for others, capitalism would not survive: The vast majority willingly accept that there are people with vast amounts of more wealth than them.
Actually, I'm not entirely sure that's true[1]: people seem to mostly just underestimate how much inequality (and thus how much wealth) there really is. They think they're sacrificing "a fair share" so there can be "enough for others" or "because everyone has to earn theirs", when actually they're just being exploited but haven't seen or acknowledged the data.
[1] http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20pre...
Marx' apologists point out, not without a reason, that one of the problems with the attempts of bringing his theories to life is that those attempts were done in countries not well suited to do it. Marxism, according to Marx, was supposed to be another step in the evolution of capitalism, yet it was tried in countries that didn't yet have any capitalism or had it in some very immature form, e.g. in post-tzar, soviet Russia.
On the other hand he was claiming that capitalism is unmaintainable and will fall by itself and that didn't happen either.
Or, more to the point, that an entirely different theory was created (Leninist vanguardism), associated itself with Marxism ("Marxism-Leninism") despite the fact that it rejected the basic foundation of Marxism, and that most of the criticism of "Marx's" solutions that is done focusses on criticism of the actions of Leninist vanguardism and further developments of that theory, which not only isn't applied in the situation to Marx's solutions expressly apply, but also aren't Marx's solutions.
> On the other hand he was claiming that capitalism is unmaintainable and will fall by itself
The 19th Century system Marx was criticizing as "Capitalism" largely has been replaced with a very different one, the modern mixed economy (which often gets called capitalism, but isn't the system Marx criticized) distinguished from capitalism in a number of ways, some of which come straight out of the Communist Manifesto (centralization of control of credit through central banks, universal public education, significant progressive taxation on income.)
If the Communist Revolution is looked at as something more like the Industrial Revolution than, say, the French Revolution, one could argue that something not altogether unlike it has been going on since the time of Marx, and that all the places that treated "Marxism-Leninism" as a state religion just distract from it.
China could have had its current prosperity (and more) much earlier if not for the Communists :(
A state that prospers without [almost] all its people prospering would appear to contradict with communist notions of state; so perhaps this is just indicative of China being a capitalist economy now with some central planning (like the UK, say!?!).
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/apr/23/ch...
http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marx...
(The Scandinavian countries have more economic freedom in their private sectors than almost all the rest of the world, including the US. That's why they can, sorta, kinda, afford those bloated States and all that Socialism. Plus Norway has the oil, of course.)
And the private sector wasn't all that big in the post-world war 2 era. Norway's government spending is now at 40% of GDP and Sweden's at 50%. And they used to be way bigger. And we're not counting cooperatives.
If only my state didn't work as well as the average Scandinavian state.
E.g. Even in the tooth-and-claw UK, I remain thankful for the fact that I can run a business without having to worry about being financially raped by healthcare providers.
The reality is that socialist-lite state funding of essential services and infrastructure gives populations a lot of freedoms that simply aren't available in a corporatocracy, and is also more stable socially, politically and economically.
Dogmatic assertions that wilfully disregard the mountains of evidence to the contrary don't have much to offer in this kind of argument.
We could make this argument also for the education, public transport, social security, etc.
The answer was quite simply stated by Marx as early as 1845, in The German Ideology, chapter one, part A [1], section 5:
"And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced"
"This development of productive forces" refers to the development of advanced capitalism, which Marx saw as an essential precondition for a successful socialist revolution.
This key principle was something Marx was clear on through his entire life, and many socialist movements stuck to it. In Russia it was one of several aspects that triggered the split between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks - Lenin was not willing to wait. And so the Bolsheviks carried out their little coup d'etat: The October "revolution" was not a popular uprising against the old regime, but a coup against the socialist government elected after the old regime had collapsed in the spring.
Marx advocated popular revolutions in developed capitalism countries. Instead you had a series of civil wars, coup d'etats, and the occasional misguided revolution, in undeveloped, mostly agrarian and feudal or near-feudal countries.
Doomed to failure from day one according to Marxist principles.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideo...
Or was he frankly just the 19th century equivalent of an Internet commenter pontificating? Because goodness knows that anybody that seems to actually listen to him experiences just about the results I'd expect from trying to organize your life around a random Internet commenter's blatherings. (Said the random Internet commenter. To which I'd say, look to history and tell me that my summary is wrong.)
In mathematical terms, it is meaningless to use one impossible statement to prove another one true. If the "proper" way to transition to a communist society is itself humanly impossible with real-world humans, is itself already a flight of fancy, then it completely doesn't matter where that flight of fancy is supposed to land. You're never going to experience the problem that my flying unicorn that I promised would land you in London instead landed you in Tokyo, because you've got a more fundamental problem in front of that one.
There is also no example of a successful free market economy, because no such thing exists.
The abstract concepts of socialism and capitalism tend to be polluted very quickly by the humans who inhabit and implement these systems. This means both types of system collapse without regulation - in the west these regulations are an extensive set of laws against monopolies, manipulating markets, insider information etc. and yet we still see regular very destructive whole-market crashes and speculative bubbles which devastate our economies. It's just the least worst system we know.
I can see how coming from a former communist block country where Marx was treated almost as a deity along with the likes of Lenin and Stalin would give you a healthy disrespect for him. However, Marx is a useful critique of capitalist dogma, even if you don't agree with his prescriptions for a solution, or the solutions people made up in his name. When he was writing capitalism in the west was in one of its most brutal and pure states and was an obviously flawed and exploitative system with little hope of improvement in life for the majority - as recorded by Engels for example at around the same time [1]. So don't mistake those who take his critique of capitalism seriously (like Varoufakis) for those who embrace every aspect of his thought or would support leninism or stalinism.
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17306/17306-h/17306-h.htm
That's like saying there's no such thing as a blue sky or green grass because the whole thing isn't #0000FF or #008000.
I think it relies on people being supporters of the ideal and not being greedy. You can't impose it on people.
In contrast in a capitalist system the capitalists can prosper from the communists desire not to exploit their fellow men; whilst in a communist system those who want to satisfy their own greed at the expense of others tear the system apart.
Those who act contrary to capitalist ideals actually help to maintain it - run a food bank, run a homeless charity and you're helping to dissolve hostility to the system that forces people in to situations where such things are necessary. Personal charity maintains the system in which those who don't exercise charity can prosper and more readily exploit others to that end.
Thoughts?
Why do you give Intellectual or personal superiority to communist?
Part of my family comes from a former communist country. The were slaves of a communist elite that of course wanted to exploit fellow men on a level that a person living on a Western society could not understand(like rapist and murderers controlling the police).
Some of them(people at the party) could barely read and write, let alone sum and substract. Chosen incompetents because they served the party better. Thinking on your own was a bad habit there.
Personal charity does not make you communist or contrary to capitalism. Communist forces OTHERS to work for free for the community(and specially for those who control the community).
>Why do you give Intellectual or personal superiority to communist? //
Probably the same reason you consider it to be superiority I'm claiming!? State capitalism and so-called Communist Dictatorships are not in the least communist (in the sense reviewed here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_society).
>Communist forces OTHERS to work for free //
That's dictatorship. It was a corollary to the point I was making. Unless everyone is committed to the communist ideal it seems it _cannot_ work - one rogue element (who wishes to have more power) will break the classless society. Whilst on the contrary in capitalism rogue elements that stand against, for example, exploitation of workers - choosing to see them as people rather than merely a means to profit - helps to calm the revolts that would otherwise inevitably come to the fore.
It's like being a violent person amongst extreme pacifists - the violence will win easily. In the converse situation the pacifist merely helps to extend the reign of violence.
Communism requires the consideration that all men deserve to be treated as though they are equal in worth. Capitalism, in full, requires that people be treated as a commodity to be exploited. Capitalism has morals purposefully ignored; communism has them as a central axiom. Sure you can casts capitalistic versions of a state in which selling people and exploitative wage setting is outlawed ("Western Capitalism" tends towards this though both negative aspects exist within it of course), for example, but you're moving away from pure capitalism then by allowing workers "ownership" of their own time and resources.
China. China's leaders claim to be Marxists. If they are not Marxists, neither have they accepted Western liberal capitalism as the End of History. China still has a planned economy. So... What is China?
Other than the mixed economies of the modern West, whose changes from the 19th Century capitalism Marx critiqued are almost all in the direction Marx advocated, for pretty much the reasons Marx advocated, and often directly as a result of actions by Marxists and other socialists?
> Is it possible that Marx's theory is nonsense and all the rich mixed-capitalism economies are right?
Its possible, but the rich mixed economies of the modern West are the closest thing (to be sure, they have important differences) to an implementation of Marx's theories that has occurred, so their relative success isn't really an indication of Marx being wrong.
It is possible. But let's not jump to conclusions. There wasn't any prosperous democratic country in Europe before cca 1600 either.
There are some smaller experiments. Things like Mondragon Cooperative or Kibutzes. These don't end too badly. It is even being claimed that they have higher productivity. They probably also exhibit lower outward growth, which tends to be bad when they compete with capitalist economies. Just like democratic societies tend to project less military force compared to dictatorships (because it doesn't help the general public, only the elites on top), these "marxist" economies also don't grow (compete in the market) very aggressively, to their disadvantage. But for the workers (I mean people doing stuff, majority of people and the ones that actually deserve to be paid) it may well be a better system, just like democracy is better than dictatorship.
For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_... : includes observations on the effect of labour-saving innovation. This keeps coming up again and again here in the context of e.g. self-driving cars.
See also this line from the middle of the article: "Both [communists and social democrats], in addition to their other errors (and, indeed, crimes) failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard: instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals."
But that's not very valuable. "Identifying problems" is easy. Step outside and point at something; you're probably pointing at a problem of some sort.
And we humans seem to be very susceptible to the argument
1. I see a problem over there.
2. I propose this solution.
3. My solution must be correct because I identified the problem.
We are not so hard pressed for the identification of problems that we need to go looking at the writings of someone from over a hundred years ago with a terrible track record of his ideas being implemented. We just need to use our eyes for a minute or two.
Solutions, now, those are hard. Based on how history has gone I do not see Marx having much to offer us there.
"instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice,"
Well, of course they did. The reason why Marxism always decays into tyranny is that it intrinsically requires liberal applications of force to even appear to work, because it does not match how people function naturally. Free societies don't look Marxist. Rational societies won't look Marxist. (Rational societies would probably be incomprehensibly strange to us, honestly, and won't fit into any of our preconceived notions. By no means should this be interpreted as even remotely a claim that our current society is rational.... ha! No. Also I appreciate the distinction between "free" and "rational".) Even if they solve the "problems" that Marx identified, it won't be with his answers.
The main reason for doing this would be to get good workable solution ideas into and out of the left in the 21st century. Greece is in a state of uneven collapse and there is a strong need to do something to improve its situation from that of debt-austerity. Varoufakis is one of the men on the spot trying to find something that can actually be delivered with a good chance of working. There are plenty of other places in the developed world where people are experiencing deteriorating standards of living and lacking the political capability to improve them. (Another idea worth incorporating is Sen's "capability", which is freedom to do a thing plus the economic ability to do it).
One should not overlook the amount of force deployed in the name of making capitalism work either.
The "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" is hardly a problem that needs serious examining especially in this day and age. Our solution to this problem was essentially inflation, and now we got ourselves in a bit of a mess because all that inflated money isn't distributed equally and the wealthier get wealthier as they're the closest to the new money. Most economists reject the idea as a whole. How is it worth examining then? When you convince professional economics to take it seriously, then what? What do you hope to find with it? Or do you just like the sound of yourself pointing out problems? -- this is what Jeff was basically saying.
Your second paragraph really has nothing to do with the rate of profit to fall, and now we're onto Greece? You really think that reckless spending by a government warrants a philosophical economic shift? No of course you don't because you think it was all innocent -- oh sure Greece just ran out of money one day and geez, it must be capitalism's fault!
There's economic downswings. This will always occur for a variety of reasons. Marx's approaches are all way too heavy-handed. You cannot strip someone's freedom and have them still care about their work, and Marx's approach nearly always ends up here. He's given way too much credit as a good, rational thinker for what I see as more just politically-rousing, pulling-on-your-heart-strings social revolution kinda writing. Yes, there's a place for compassion but it is not found in a system and capitalism is a system.
Which brings me to my last point. Your note about not "overlooking the amount of force deployed making capitalism work" is not fair because you're basically equating rule makers with dictators. Capitalism can exist outside of the rule markers in a completely free sense (that's not to say it will be operating perfectly). End of the world happens. Me and my team of 100 people use gold to indicate value and thus begin trading and building value. In Marx's hypothetical scenario, he would probably start calling the shots and complaining about the class struggle. One is a system that runs off of people's free-will and desire for vanity and self-validation and all that. The other is fancy-sounding system that boils down to "You do this. You do that.", which fails the criteria of an autonomous system. Marx's solutions are thus not autonomous and should be immediately rejected on this merit alone.
My advice? Look for the light yourself. Find out what's not working in the current system. Strategize. Plan. Execute. Marx just isn't relevant anymore and, again, should be rejected on that merit alone. I'm all for learning from history and taking away important lessons -- relevant or irrelevant -- but Marx's economic principles are quite literally irrelevant. They have NO relevance with how we operate today. The solution is therefore INCREDIBLY RADICAL, which as we programmers should know, runs the greatest risk! This is why I reject Marx. It's nothing personal against him or because I have some capitalist agenda. I just think we can do better with what we got and should focus on that.
I was referring to force that has been deployed in the name of capitalism, not hypotheticals. Things ranging from US's for-profit prison system with its unusually large number of prisoners to the United Fruit Company. Capitalism+colonialism in particular has a terrible record.
Yes, Marxism and Marxists as currently prevalent need to really examine their failure record and revise accordingly. Capitalism as a political practice also needs to stop disclaiming responsibility for its casualties. In neither case is it helpful to make arguments about how it might be come the revolution/after the end of the world, because in both cases people make unreasonable claims about how things might work.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_mar...
There are probably some economics PHDs floating around this thread, and if you like talking about this stuff and would be willing to critique the stuff I've put together, ping me @afat.
But do not be mistaken, this guy is not stupid and probably can negotiate better deal for Greece.
It does seem, however, mob mentality (think the effect Hitler's speeches had, despite such insane content) combined with a dictatorship of the proletariat creates the perfect open field for totalitarianism to take hold, where even further power is taken from the working class. The fact it also creates a scapegoat in the capitalist, wealthy class is even worse.
What does this mean? It sounds like you're trying to emphasize it as something good but I can't see how anything with the word dictatorship in it can be that.
That is what Marx coined it as. Perhaps dictatorship wasn't so strongly associated with tyranny at the time of writing as it is now, which would make sense since we have much greater access to information now, especially accounts on what all the dictatorships of the 20th century were like.
This simplifies to "if you don't agree with me, you're too much of an idiot to participate in the conversation". It's a profoundly anti-democratic idea. (Again, presuming that I understand it correctly.)
Consider that Marx referred to capitalist democracies as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: The bourgeois/capitalist class maintains the balance of power.
It's also worth pointing out that Marx did not describe the dictatorship of the proletariat as something desirable, but as a necessary temporary state. At the same time he pointed out that there's a fundamental difference: Any capitalist can become a proletarian simply by giving up his wealth.
I read Capital and some other bugs. Problem is that Marxism defined as 'class struggle' is essentially hate movement, they are defined by their enemy. Once they come to power and the 'class struggle' is solved, it does not have any more solutions. So it needs 'constant revolution'.
> For one, a dictatorship of the working class, such as direct democracy, is a cornerstone of communism but clearly did not feature in Soviet states.
It did. But 'working class' was defined as factory workers, but 90% of people were working in agriculture. Marxist solution was to convert everyone into factory worker and kill rest.
> It was a distortion by Stalin, I believe, since it's also called Stalinism.
Stalin was not distortion, there were other leaders similar to him, who would take his place if we would not exist. Also other countries followed similar fate (China, North Korea...)
From what I've read about Marx's theories and the Soviet Union, they are two separate things. It's like comparing communism to state capitalism.
Stalin also lived a life of luxury whilst many starved. This is exactly what communism was meant to prevent. This is just capitalism gone wild but where the state has a monopoly. The man at the top still eats 3 meals a day whilst enjoying movies and fine wine where a whole strata goes hungry.
Funny side note: I was born in Scotland but told I'm not Scottish. I'm literally not a true scotsman. Made me laugh.
Landless peasants were remainder of 'feudalism' and needed to be 'saved'. If peasants owned even small farm, that made him capitalist and enemy.
It does not say anything peasants should have any sort of voting rights, or even control.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1964/xx/collect...
> Stalin also lived a life of luxury whilst many starved.
Stalin lived very modest live compared to other leaders.
It was explicitly an attempt to "work around" the many parts of Marx' theories that Lenins opposition in the RSDLP used against his own insistence that it would be possible to carry out a socialist revolution in Russia.
When Lenins theory proved conclusively false (the Bolsheviks only managed to get support in the big cities in the elections in 1917, hence their coup d'etat), the Bolsheviks tried a wide range of approaches to demonise and marginalize farmers, and eventually tried to force them into collectives.
typo, but it fits.
The entire first half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto, for example is one long description of how the bourgeoisie / capitalist have driven humanity forwards.
> It did.
It did not. Not past the October "revolution". The Bolsheviks played with it as long as it suited them (that is, as long as they did not have influence in the democratically elected Provisional Government, but had influence in the Soviets set up in the Moscow and Petrograd soviets), but when it was clear that most people did not support them, they quickly curtailed the power of the Soviets and hunted down and murdered thousands of leaders of opposition groups that countered their influence in them. Including Marxists.
> Stalin was not distortion, there were other leaders similar to him, who would take his place if we would not exist
After he had murdered and exiled the opposition in his own party, yes. Which against followed the murder and exile and prohibition of Marxist and other socialist groups years earlier.
[EDIT: Maybe whomever downvoted could bother replying]
The need for proletarian revolution. And I am talking about marxism, not Marx works. Marx himself mostly hated local socialists (they wanted practical stuff and found him ridiculous).
> Not past the October "revolution". The Bolsheviks played with it as long as it suited them...
Bunch of guys have this bible about how revolution is necessary, how it will solve everything, and how heaven on earth is coming. And when majority disagree with them, they just apologize, step down, and quietly leave to deserted island to build their version of Utopia alone?
> After he had murdered and exiled the opposition in his own party, yes. Which against followed the murder and exile and prohibition of Marxist and other socialist groups years earlier.
Personality cult raised in every soviet country. It is very convenient to blame everything on single person and not on the system itself. If anything famous Trockij loved 'doing paper work' even more than Stalin.
> Maybe whomever downvoted could bother replying
I upvoted and hate this on HN as well.
Why did you call jwdunne's distinction between Marx's theories and marxism a "no true scotsman" when you're making the exact same difference?
> Marx himself mostly hated local socialists (they wanted practical stuff and found him ridiculous).
HAH! That is the complete opposite:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ou...
'Accusing Guesde and Lafargue of “revolutionary phrase-mongering” and of denying the value of reformist struggles, Marx made his famous remark that, if their politics represented Marxism, “ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (“what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist”).'
He had this to say in the introduction though:
> “I do not by any means depict the capitalist and the landlord in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests. My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.” (Marx, Capital Vol. I, 92)
Marx clearly opposes the personification of the conflict between classes. The aim of his Capital project was precisely to demonstrate how people's actions are determined by social relations, and not by greed or evilness. And what he wanted to replace were these social relations themselves, not the individuals affected by them.
Also, the no true Scotsmen fallacy refers to universal claims, like "Scottish people don't put sugar in their tea". Saying that Lenin had a different view of the world than Marx, and very different ideas on what needs to change and how, can be easily backed with facts. That is not a fallacy.
"Communism" was the name of the system Marx advocated (the title of his work with Engels is The Communist Manifesto.)
Now, Soviet Communism is distinct from Marx's Communism in that it is based in Leninist vanguardism, which still calls itself Marxist, but radically departs from Marxism in a number of ways, both in terms of understood preconditions and program, in order to address the fact that Russia was not an developed capitalist society of the type Marx's theory was based in.
This determination to have the complete, closed story, or model, the final word, is something I cannot forgive Marx for. It proved, after all, responsible for a great deal of error and, more significantly, authoritarianism. Errors and authoritarianism that are largely responsible for the left’s current impotence as a force of good and as a check on the abuses of reason and liberty that the neoliberal crew are overseeing today.
He's not wrong that Marx relied on manufacturing a sense of "binary oppositions" to drive his cartoon of history, but while such a story is great for creating drama it does a demonstrably, repeated, empirically terrible job as a way of either understanding history or changing the world, unless by "changing the world" you mean "changing the world into one vast prison camp".
It is far too easy to pass from benign academic twaddle about "binary oppositions" to "us vs them" to "you're either with us or against us... and we get to say which you are, not you." Marxism is made for the power-mad, precisely because of this obsession with the "binary oppositions" Varoufakis is so enamoured of.
The insistence that "binary oppositions" dominate history does strongly inform the labour theory of value, but the analysis is transparently false. Labour is special because human beings have a special place in any political economy, simply because there wouldn't be one without us. But the "binary opposition" he sees as being unique to labour is nonsense, and this would be obvious if the role of "binary oppositions" in his theory didn't serve as a major distraction to analysis.
Consider for a moment the "binary opposition" between electricity's value-creating potential that can never be quantified in advance, and electricity as a quantity that can be sold for a price. A kWhr that goes into a supercomputer to calculate the optimal shape of a machine part creates value of a kind and in amounts that is utterly unlike a kWhr that goes into driving a washing machine at a laundromat.
This is precisely the "binary opposition" that Varoufakis touts as being unique to labour. It is nothing of the kind. It was nothing of the kind in the days when a lump of coal could be used to heat a pauper's hut or fire a steel mill. All economic inputs have both an unquantifiable-in-advance value-creating capacity and a market value.
Humans are fascinated by conflict. Present us with a conflict and it will grab our limited attention, leaving very little over to ask, "Hey, all this sound and fury is kind of signifying nothing."
This is the most important role of "binary oppositions" in Marxism (and its bastard step-child, post-modernist literary analysis.) It uses this simple flaw in our attentional structure to allow people to smuggle claims that would otherwise be obviously false right under our noses.
Do capital and labour have somewhat different interests? Sure. Do they have many interests that are also shared, based on their common nature of human beings? Absolutely. This is not a binary opposition. This is an argument for a democratic clearing house where differences are aired and decisions made. There needs to be eternal vigilance that one side or the other (mostly the other) doesn't gain undue influence in such a place, but the false belief that the world is dominated by black-and-white "binary oppositions" is completely unhelpful in this enterprise. It sheds no light on our legitimate differences, and trying to fix things up later on by talking about "intersectionality" is a poor patch on a broken analysis.
We are not a set of 1's and 0's in binary opposition to each other, some with the bit flipped to "labour", some to "capital". We are human beings, full of contradictions far more complex and diverse than this ridiculous scientistic reductionism can possibly encompass.
In fact, that's true of everything in a market economy. Everything I buy has more value to me than its market price (otherwise I wouldn't buy it).
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http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marx...
I'm a doctoral student in philosophy, who focuses on Marx and Marxism. It's the only subject I feel confident speaking on with some degree of authority. I do want to point out that those who see this article as starting from an erroneous point of view are correct. There's several clarifications that should be made if one is going to understand Marx (and I emphasize understand, not support – not that supporting Marx’s work is good/bad in and of itself).
First: The constant idea that Marx can be tied to the dungeon regimes of the 20th century is untenable. Of the tens of thousands of pages and approximately 50 volumes of collected works of Marx, at most 5 pages spell out what socialist society should or ought to look like. There's many reasons why Marx thought a discussion of what a future society should look like is a dubious endeavor. To summarize them curtly, imagine an ancient Athenian trying to envision wall street, it’s very dubious they could. The material and social conditions they are in limit and structure the thoughts they can have, ipso facto to envision a blue print for socialism is rather futile. Within those 5 pages though, none of them say anything about death camps, non-democratic institutions, cults of personality, or STATE based economies as the ultimate goal of society. They consistently advocate for the full development and realization of the best aspect of our capacities and nature (e.g., ‘the freedom and development of each is contingent upon the freedom and development of all’). Now one could ask what about the famous quote "dictatorship of the proletariat." It is important to note that in the mid 19th century context dictatorship did not mean exactly what it means today. It meant who has power in the state. So Marx would say we presently live in the dictatorship of the capitalist class (even if the state is prima facie democratic, that class has monopoly power of the state – I don’t think this point is contested by anyone that follows campaign donations and its connection to voting patterns by representatives). Marx wanted the workers to have power over the state, but in a democratic fashion (hence his praise of the paris commune). When asked what does dictatorship of the proletariat mean, Marx and Engels responded, look at the Paris commune, that is what we mean (Marx later went to affirm that it also meant equal voting rights for all races and genders). I say all this to indicate that Marx is a critical philosopher of capitalism; he is not a philosopher of socialism. And the few things he did write on socialism are anathema to anything tantamount to the USSR, Pol Pot, Mao's China, etc.
Second: Socialism is NOT - according to Marx - state based regulation and social programs. This is a common misconception. People argue that social security and Medicare are SOCIALIST (or that the USSR was socialist), they are in fact SOCIAL programs in a CAPITALIST society. Their existence is predicated upon revenues and taxes of people employed in a capitalist social relation. Socialism, according to Marx (and many other 19th century and early 20th century theorists) is workers ownership of the means of production. That means the same people that work in the workplace, own it democratically. So, McDonalds for instance would not be run by a board of directors that is divorced from the day to day management and running of the store. Instead the same people that work there, democratically run the workplace (read Richard Wolff’s Democracy at Work for a good defense of why this system is both viable and just – there are hundreds of successful institutions like this, Wikipedia Mondragon if you’re interested). Democracy prevents monopoly ownership of the means of production. Part of the reason Marx does not thing welfare liberalism (e.g., a capitalist society with strong social programs) is viable in the long-term is due to various contradictions and negative tendencies in capitalism. If value is created in production, and surplus value must be created and reproduced in the capitalist system to fuel its growth and development, then it follows that taxes and welfare programs are a leech on that value. What is good for capitalism in the long term (i.e., maximum surplus value) is bad for the working class, what is good for the working class (share of surplus value going back to them in higher wages or better social programs) is bad for capitalism in the long term. This seems rather obvious now; the system is prone for local and large scale crises. It's also important to note that this definition of socialism, that Marx used, is antithetical to the state-capitalist (socialist in name only) regimes of Stalin, Mao, etc. Those were non-democratic, authoritarian regimes, where the workplace was run by bureaucrats and non-democratically elected state officials. Thus not socialist, and not indicative of the possible failure/success of socialism.
Third, and finally: the comments on human behavior are rather confused. If one looked at a slave society we could make all kinds of ‘natural human behavior claims’ (notice the author says its human behavior to watch TV – tell that to a hunter gatherer) that are now obviously false. E.g., it’s just human behavior to shackle people; it’s just human behavior/nature that X race is illiterate, dumb, feckless, etc. It’s just human behavior for one race/class/gender to be subservient, and for one race/class/gender to be dominant and hold leadership traits. What needs to be pointed out is that certain institutions and social relations bring out the good and bad in human behavior. They stunt, inhibit, or foster, our capacities. Some institutions and relations make us better, some make us worse. So it’s foolish to read off from a particular society with all its unique and historical nuance, timeless truths about human behavior. Are twenty-first century Americans addicted to their property and possessive? Yes. Were ancient Greeks polytheistic believing the gods were tantamount to humans?Yes. Were X race of people in a position of servitude by Y oppressors? Yes. Does that mean these are timeless traits of all humans at all times? That's a rather impossible claim to be certain of. And in many instances demonstrably false (e.g., basically every race based claim in human history by oppressors is later shown to be false). According to Marx and Engels, we should foster and develop institutions and relations that express what's best in us, but if we maintain the mindset that we already know everything there is to know about human behavior and nature, and all future projects at amending and improving such things are futile, we are supporting an impossible to defend position (as philosophers and rational thinkers that's no good). Marx knew this very well. Hence why he ends Volume III of capital with the claim:
“In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature”
Overall this is a rather bad article. If one wants to understand Marx, just read Marx. Even if you don’t agree with him, and don’t want to support his ideas, the only way to be sure of what he said is to read him yourself. It’s only fair – and actually quite liberal and open minded – if one is going to live in a capitalist society to read its best proponents, and also its best critics. Marx is the latter.
Set aside the rosy situations where the workers share the surplus, what happens when workers collectively squander and fk up the means of production? Because, in reality, that is exactly what happened.
Something like, "Marx was completely right about capitalism and completely wrong about communism."
Interesting thought experiment at least.
Yanis should feel right at home in Greece, seeing as essentially they have run out of money from Germany.
If you take a look at blue chip companies (and I bet a lot of midcaps as well) a huge amount of their shares, often way over 50%, is owned by their employees. This fact doesn't necessarily help sell Che Guevara t-shirts or help your populist party win elections, though.
- they can't (or don't care to) coordinate themselves
- don't have the necessary expert knowledge to understand the impact of a lot of motions proposed to the general assembly.
However, this isn't a capitalism problem, but a general power structure problem, applicable to any institution, be that capitalist or socialist.
Points for political snark, though.
I can easily imagine that a just IPO'ed company would have a vastly different shareholder structure, though.
http://www.societegenerale.com/en/measuring-our-performance/...
I thought that maybe my source meant the relative size of non-public shares, but even then it's ca. 49% employee ownership.
Yeah, sorry for that. I stand corrected.