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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.

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

"There is also no example of a successful free market economy, because no such thing exists."

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.

Why is it that there is not - nor ever was - a single country built on Marxist principles?

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...

But why should I care about that analysis in the slightest? From whence does Marx's authority to pontificate about the "proper" way to transition to communism come from? Did he have some sort of extensive experience with the process such that he could identify the differences between the successful efforts and the failed ones? Had he tested it multiple times and learned which ones worked and which did not? Did he successfully create Psychohistory, prove its efficaciousness in a wide variety of circumstances, and then derive from this successful model the optimal governmental organization and path to get there, a 19th century Hari Seldon?

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.

I think most common way of thinking about Marx' work today is that he was often right in describing what's wrong with the capitalism, but he was mostly wrong at the solutions.

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.

"On the other hand he was claiming that capitalism is unmaintainable and will fall by itself and that didn't happen either" yet...

One issue with the more traditional marxist point of view is that it tends to treat "capitalism" as a permanent, monolithic entity. The capitalism that Marx observed in places like Manchester in the XIX century effectively fell a long time ago, along with the British empire and the steam machine. If one wants to translate Marx's principles to the modern world, a very critical eye is needed. I believe that is what Varoufakis is trying to do here.

> 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.

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.

>Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles? //

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?

I don't think giving money to the poor is "contrary to capitalist ideals" if it's voluntary.

"In contrast in a capitalist system the capitalists can prosper from the communists desire not to exploit their fellow men"

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).

As the quote says ~"in capitalism man exploits man, in communism it's the other way around" (credited to JK Galbraith). The premise of the thread is that there has never been a truly Marxist state; personally I've not seen any evidence for a truly communist one either (but admit my knowledge is relatively weak). Most states called communist appear to be communist dictatorships and this is where this aphorism fits rather well.

>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.

> Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles?

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.

> Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles? Is it possible that Marx's theory is nonsense and all the rich mixed-capitalism economies are right?

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.

All those northern European social democratic parties started out as parties devoted to bringing about communism through democratic means. The countries governed by those have done pretty well.

They were kept in check by the other parties -- and the smartest of the smartest amongst the Social Democrats understood that the state didn't actually work and that they needed a free private sector to tax so they could afford to buy votes.

(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.)

What I wrote there was correct and a positive contribution to the discussion and can be backed with sources. No need to downvote just because one disagrees.

Forget about discussing anything here. You'll get downvoted to oblivion by the Marxist religious zealots.

You have some good points, but I dislike how you say "buy votes". Is it only buying votes when you give money to the poor instead of the rich?

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.

The poor have more votes and are probably cheaper to buy ;)

But as can be seen in the US, policies that favor the rich are effect buy-outs of votes, too. Just that they target temporarily embarrassed millionaires (same group, different promise).

"the state didn't actually work"

If only my state didn't work as well as the average Scandinavian state.

Indeed. It's only possible to claim that European Social Democracy is some kind of ordeal for most of the population, compared to US Capitalism if you ignore all the facts.

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.

But private companies in your country tend to work better than the state, unless protected somehow by that state, don't they?

Compare the private health system of US with the state health system in the Scandinavian countries or most of the EU and tell me which runs better and is more efficient?

We could make this argument also for the education, public transport, social security, etc.

They were never utopic, so communism wasn't on the agenda. They wanted socialism to varying degrees.

https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_mar... is probably a good start.

The problem with Marx is that he usually provides insightful diagnostics but lousy solutions. As Varoufakis says, social-democracy was very influenced by a subset of Marx's ideas. There have been plenty of prosperous social-democratic countries.

> 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.

http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2uegfi/karl_marx...

Marx was foremost an economist and philosopher not a revolutionary, his ideas laid the basis for the later historical movements - but they shouldn't be conflated with them, of course the actual historical events are much stronger in cultural memory.

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.

I do not have real data but I guess (and I am being too candid here, this being HN) that those where quality of life is significantly worse have not got a good stance on the importance of the rule of law (i.e. they are mostly dictatorships in disguise, like Russia).

So there is no example of Marxism working.

no, there just is no such thing as "Marxism" as a nation-state level policy.

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 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"

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.

That's like saying: so there is no example of existentialism working? Marxism can't be reduced to a ready made model for how society should work.

There's also no example of capitalism working. That didn't stop us from using it and trying to fix all the problems it produces - an ongoing process, which fails all the time.

"outside the EU" which rules out the majority of Eastern Europe. nice slight of hand. Those countries had developed economies and education systems to begin with.

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 foremost an economist and philosopher not a revolutionary,

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.

> Marx was very much a political activist (if not a revolutionary in the violent sense), and pretending he wasn't isn't particularly helpful.

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.

> Why is it that there is not - nor never was - a single prosperous country build on Marxist principles?

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?

Because a lie repeated 100's time MAY be believed as truth. (former socialist country too and fed with all this new socialism)

China?

The Communist Party of China is not exactly Communist anymore, is it?

China could have had its current prosperity (and more) much earlier if not for the Communists :(

The communists - if they were actually communist - surely wanted the people of China to prosper. The past leaderships of China, I'm really not sure about but it seems pretty clear that the "current prosperity" you're referring to isn't prosperity of the people in general.

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!?!).

not sure if trolling....

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/apr/23/ch...

It's definitely capitalist. It's sometimes referred to as "capitalism with asian values" or more correctly "authoritarian capitalism". It's happening right now and it's sadly more effective than western liberal capitalism.

Probably because humans don't like to sacrifice that much for others, and such a system could never work on humans without total control of those within the system - which is a democracy destroyer and also doesn't work because pesky humans tend to love their freedoms quite a bit, too.

I find this argument odd. Marx did not argue for most people to sacrifice. On the contrary: He argued for the majority to recognise that the minority would not willingly lift them up, and instead to rise up and take their share.

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.

>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...