aelf said:Heck, economics isn't too good at predicting things. Does that mean all of them are crap?
Yes

aelf said:Heck, economics isn't too good at predicting things. Does that mean all of them are crap?
The introductory guides on libcom.org are a decent short introduction to some of the basics of communist thought, and provide an overview of the main trends of libertarian socialism (anarchism and left-Marxist). I recommend these to start with:I want to start a thread comparing an ideal* communist and ideal capitalist state, and the road to get there.
Can a Red suggest me any links that can fill me in on communism enough to start an unbiased discussion ( in less then ~100 A4 pages of text )?
aelf said:You economist!
Alassius, I will say this again: this is an Ask A Red thread, not a place for you to carry out your dishonest and poorly-informed polemicising. If you have questions, ask them clearly and politely, without these snide remarks and this dishonest twisting of words. If you don't stop carrying on like this, I'm going to have to ask the moderators to bar you from posting in this thread.
I never got what the obsession with predicting things is about. Plenty of political theories have no utility for making predictions. Heck, economics isn't too good at predicting things. Does that mean all of them are crap?
Maybe there is another source of disagreement here - the difference between those with scientific pretensions and those who understand what the 'humanities' entail.
Despite what our dear comrades might have implied, Marx himself did make predictions, and he did call his theories scientific. If anything, the difference is between Popperian skepticism, which suggests you can make social predictions, but you should never think you are infallible; and Marxist materialism, which holds itself as the one and only universal truth, with a credibility on making predictions on par with physics.
Making predictions is, however awful we are at it, indispensable. A government has to understand how much taxes it can collect, how much spending it can afford, what interest rates should be, etc. You have to make those decisions, even if you don't know whether you are doing the right thing. Relying economic theories that are sometimes right - some would say often - is better than making completely random choices.
If you read Popper, you will notice that although he maintained that absolute truth is unreachable, he wasn't a classical skeptic who claimed nothing is knowable. He proposed something called "verisimilitude", or the altitude of truth. If a theory makes a successful prediction where other theories were proven wrong, it has a higher verisimilitude, and is more trustworthy. Before you find better theories that can replace it, the best that you have is what you use.
We've been through these same points many times, but I shall repeat myself again. Has it not occurred to you that, given the large body of work produced by Marx and Marxists, it is possible for a Marxist not to subscribe to a scientific view of dialectical materialism? Certainly, for someone who professes to be anti-dogmatic, you sure love to hold on to certain beliefs dogmatically.
As others have said, it's really not worth debating this with you - not because you are absolutely right, but because it's just a case of rehashing the same things all the time.
Au contraire, I think we have achieved a rather great deal. Nobody is still defending Lenin, for example, or proposing that communism is inevitable.
Alassius said:As for dogmaticism, if you disagree with Marx's solution of how to create communism, his predictions of the doom of capitalism, his view that social democracy could not work, or even his idea of scientificity of materialism, would you have at some point stopped being a Marxist, and become a revisionist?
The trouble, of course, is not me calling you a revisionist. It is the other communists, if they ever acquire power. Given that the honourable gentlemen here have so far failed to propose something practical, and given the aforementioned need of practical policies, I highly doubt you will win against a resourceful, resolved, and underhanded autocrat, at which point what you subscribe to is no more relevant than which anime I prefer. Hence, merely saying you are not for centralism is no defence against it. That's what I've been talking about. You still need proper defences, like private property![]()
Given that the honourable gentlemen here have so far failed to propose something practical, and given the aforementioned need of practical policies, I highly doubt you will win against a resourceful, resolved, and underhanded autocrat, at which point what you subscribe to is no more relevant than which anime I prefer.
Can you recommend any good books on Marxist literary criticism? I am taking a class on literary theory right now and am considering writing my term paper with a Marxist reading of whatever text I end up choosing.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to make it clear exactly where you deviate from what I would consider to be an honest and well-informed critique of Marxism, nor do I consider it particularly necessary; once again, "hiding" or not, I'm going to simply repeat my request that you actually use this thread as it is intended to be used, and cease your soap-boxing. This thread is what it is, and if you don't like it, clear off and start another. Simple as that."[D]ishonest and poorly-informed" is a pretty serious allegation. You will have to justify that. Otherwise, please, stop hiding behind this "ask a red" line. It's been used for little more than deflecting criticisms that you are unable to defend against.
What do you mean by "neo-Nazis", exactly? There's a necessary distinction between a gaggle of white power skinheads with swastika tattoos and the British National Party.What do you feel about neo-Nazis in today's society?
You might want to check out The Frankfurt School. I'm familiar to some extent with Adorno and Horkheimer (through Enlightenment as Mass Deception and Critical Theory), but they mostly deal with critique of culture in general. Georg Lukács is a bona fide classic Marxist literary critic. Today, there's also Terry Eagleton and perhaps Spivak if you can stand her postmodernist style and influences.
Now I'm going to address this sentence specifically. When you speak of "practical", I suspect you really mean "political", and I don't see revolution as primarily a political undertaking. Politics will always be relevant, but political power should not be the primary means of instigating change.
The praxis I believe in is primarily cultural, hence my insistence that Marxism is a framework for critique. It's a way of making sense of the world, of analysing and classifying phenomena - things that are but not necessarily will be. In my view, the cultural praxis aims not at a dictatorship of the proletariat, but at a benign kind of cultural hegemony. Marx knew that the only way a communist society could sustain itself was if its members got used to how it works. That is when a dictatorship, in any sense of the word, is no longer necessary. But Marx thought of this as an adaptation - culture adapts to the new relations of production.
The particular brand of revisionism that I subscribe to is the kind that questions the base-and-superstructure orthodoxy without throwing materialism out altogether. This entails a more organic view of economics, politics and culture, which opens the way for culture to spearhead change. And the cultural mission is tied up with discourses. Simply put, we have to keep up the critique and resist dominant discourses that are reactionary. We do this until the weight shifts and the prevailing hegemonic discourses no longer uphold the logic of capital as the highest form of human organisation - not because dissenting views are simply censored out, but because society has become much less receptive of them.
This is by no means impossible. Culture has changed over the last century. Part of the job is to watch for and resist attempts to shift it back inch-by-inch, as fashionable neoliberal discourses are seeking to do. It's the long road, but it's how social transformation can come about without the costs associated with the Marxist-Leninist attempts of yesteryear.
"Politics", as Wikipedia defines it, is "a process by which groups of people make collective decisions". Whatever you use to instigate your change, the result of change is precisely such a process. A new process is the entire point of having a revolution. This process can be either authoritarian, or democratic, or something in between, or, like Marx imagined, trivial because everyone would just agree with each other, "got used to how it works". When you said "political power should not be the primary means of instigating change", you meant that everyone would have already agreed on what that change should be, so no top-down dictation is necessary.
Alassius said:This "more organic view of economics, politics and culture" is but a thinly disguised rephrase of the single, unanimous class consciousness, the most evil idea among all Marxist concepts. Coupled with the other idea that truth is manifest, it was the direct intellectual justification of political persecution. Truth is unique, manifest, and obviously Marxist. The "organic view" that is the proletarian class consciousness must then be the Truth. Anything against the Truth cannot possibly be valid, hence it must be "dishonest and poorly-informed", even if you cannot explain why.
Alassius said:So a dissident must be either: 1) not a proletarian and not sharing the consciousness - but would be subject to the dictatorship; 2) a proletarian but somehow not speaking his mind, i.e. has false consciousness. Either way, the society is not supposed to be "receptive" of dissidents, because in theory dissidents would simply be reformed by 1) making them proletarian by depriving them of possessions; 2) education. As usual, this optimistic view ran into trouble when it encountered reality. The dissidents resisted reforming.
Alassius said:What do you do about those few obstinate reactionaries, when you have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with them? Allowing them to freely subvert the revolution? Surely not. How about throwing them into "corrective labor camps" and "reeducation institutes"?
Alassius said:The simple truth is that an ideal communist society cannot tolerate dissidence, because dissidence is theoretically impossible. All your claims of how communism would not require centralised coercion is based on the assumption that everyone will magically, perpetually agree with you. Your process has no way to deal with disagreement. The moment disagreement occurs is the moment your system is thrown into disarray, until someone comes up with a process that can actually resolve conflicts. Guess what kind of process is the most expedient?