Aleksey_aka_al
Smiley
What’s the worst thing to do in life?
Communism, Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, What are your thoughts?
- Thread starter Joij21
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What’s the worst thing to do in life?
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
Hoarding happens as a consequence of exchange value, which wouldn't exist within a communist society. Distribution of goods would be decided democratically according to need, so what would be the purpose of hoarding? Like I suppose you could "hoard" toothbrushes, but when the toothbrush factory is owned collectively by the society and everyone who needs a toothbrush will be given a toothbrush, you are cut off from any ability to create a hoard through despotic ownership of the means of production, and any ability or incentive to profit from the creation of a hoard. A great comparison would be Vietnam this year during the early stages of COVID, where the government, in anticipation of panic-buying/hoarding, simply provided food and other necessities to anybody who needed them, and so they didn't experience the same sorts of panic-buying behavior we saw in the US.
As for laziness, likewise the social relationship to labor would be completely different than it exists in our current form. Most behaviors which we would characterize as "lazy" today are a consequence of alienation, which would be eliminated within a communist society. When you aren't working merely for the sake of working, but rather to provide real goods whose benefits you will be able to tangibly see and experience personally, you're going to be far more willing and eager to chip in, particularly when the amount of work being asked of you is, like, a couple hours a day rather than like 2/3 of your adult waking hours.
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Ferocitus
Deity
Only because his ideas have been around longer than Germaine Greer's.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Would they be obvious if socialists had not spent the last two centuries loudly proclaiming them?
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Nothing says importance and prescience like blithe hatred of trans people, I suppose.
You mean no one would have noticed its faults if it weren't for Marx and his followers? I'm sure that poverty, exploitation and accumulation of wealth by the rich had never occurred to folks prior to 1848. Marx's influence is that he codified a response to the social terrors of the day such that there was language to talk about it. His "solutions" were of less importance than the dialogue that followed.
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Yes, his solutions were so unimportant, that no one after him bothered to engage with his body of work ever again, and they just did their own thing.
Seon
Not An Evil Liar
I mean it’s not like Marx devised a system of analysis for arriving at a true solution in historical analysis based on a dialogue and evidence. It’s not as if something dialectical and material like that exists.
The dialogue and method of arriving at solutions is a major part of his contribution. Pointing out that his exact details of solutions are outdated makes about as much sense as pointing out Adam Smith’s contribution to capitalism is irrelevant, as royalty no longer possess much in terms of monopoly of rights.
The dialogue and method of arriving at solutions is a major part of his contribution. Pointing out that his exact details of solutions are outdated makes about as much sense as pointing out Adam Smith’s contribution to capitalism is irrelevant, as royalty no longer possess much in terms of monopoly of rights.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
I think you're misunderstanding what is meant by Marx describing the ills of capitalism, and to that end, I would suggest you read Engels' Anti-Dühring, which lays out quite succinctly and eloquently what Marxism is and what Marxism did. It isn't merely that Marx identified the ills of capitalism, which, as you rightly note, were very well observed from the Levellers to Charles Dickens, to the early utopian socialists like Fourier, Robert Owen, and Saint-Simon. What makes Marx important and transformative were (among others) three key things.
The first was to move away from moralizing depictions of the ills of what capitalism does to a more holistic, and scientific description of what capitalism is. He provided the first comprehensive analysis of the mechanisms at play within the structure, not only how it does what it does, but why it by necessity must do those things, and how those things make it intrinsically unstable and prone to cyclical crises. To say Marx's description of capitalism and its driving forces is unremarkable would be like to say the same of Darwin's description of Evolution through natural selection. Yes, of course natural scientists had known for hundreds of years that all living organisms were related, and that species exhibit changes over time, but Darwin provided the critical observations and descriptions for how and by what mechanisms those changes occurred. Marx did the same for capitalism.
The second key thing Marx did in his analysis was to place capitalism within its historical context. He explained the historical forces which coalesced in the Early Modern period which manifested ultimately in the bourgeois revolutions in the 17th century in England, in the 18th in France and the US, and in the 19th in France (again) and Germany. This seems a rather banal observation, but it was absolutely critical in moving the analysis away from abstract, essentializing characterizations common of the French, Scottish, and German philosophers in the 18th century, and the Utopian socialists of the early 19th, which posited capitalism as merely a natural form which must be mitigated, and towards an understanding of capitalism as a historical process which arose as a consequence of the forces and structures which preceded it, and which can be overturned by the structures which it produced.
Finally, and I would say, most critically, Marx provided the tools for continuing to examine and understand capitalism and all the various forms it was to adopt going forward in the form of dialectical materialism. The whole body of Marxian knowledge exists not because the people who produced that knowledge thought Marx was a swell dude, but because they took this tool and applied it to all manner of things Marx didn't, from colonialism, to feminism, imperialism, racism, hegemony, you name it.
And I want to emphasize again, Marx wasn't just some guy "responding to the social terrors of the day." He was formulating a framework for understanding the entire economic mode. Sure there were some things which he couldn't have possibly anticipated - mass media comes most prominently to mind. But the thing which makes Marx so remarkable, and so timeless, is the way he was able to anticipate a great many things which were to come, and the way he describes things which, even today, seem oddly prophetic. E.g., I was reading the 18th of Brumaire today, and holy horsehocky:
[Okay, I started copying out passages, but rapidly realized I was copying out the whole thing. But the essay is extremely salient both in the light of Trump's election (which Matt Christman described rather succinctly here), in the rise of fascism more broadly, and in the recent uprisings, and their co-optation and descent into increasing irrelevancy. Oh, also the equation of even the most benign liberal reforms with socialism.]
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Zardnaar
Deity
Such things are ranked. USA is in the high end of flawed/hybrid democracies. Modern Russia is ranked as an authoritarian state (towards the high end) while Stalinist USSR would be ranked near the bottom keeping North Korea company.
Zardnaar
Deity
They couldn't. They had full employment but often had 2-3 people doing a one person job.
It's also a reason they struggled to feed themselves. The state farms were a joke.
You can't produce enough food to feed everyone on 2-3 hours work per day. You could feed yourself I suppose with that amount of work.
Then you're also going to have to make your own clothes, own tools etc.
Zardnaar
Deity
Try going to done other cultures buf you think capitalism is so bad. Of USA flawed democracy.
Think it's any better in most if the world? Think the Chinese for example aren't racists?
The drugs, hormones and surgery would be unavailable in Communist states. They would be seen as deviants wanting extra resources provided by the state. Even now post communist China and Russia are well known as bastions of LBGQT rights.
That's independent of the economic system. I suspect outside capitalism they would have it even worse. At best you would be a cross dresser and society might treat you better but the surgery and drugs would be unavailable.
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Nice post.
A couple of things, though. I don't disagree with all that Marx did for the once and future dialogue on economics but that is different than actually providing a workable solution to the problem: Marxism. He rewrote the script for discussions but unlike Darwin he did not offer up a solution that could work. So as long as you take his workers paradise solution off the table go ahead and rank his importance right up there.
More specifically, about your point 2. What I bolded above. Capitalism as a natural process that needs to be undone. I am not an authority on Marx or his writings, but the notion that there is a pre-determination in economic progress that has a path to follow sounds, well, silly to me. It is not a particularly significant point, but it did stand out.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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It's also worth pointing out that must of the work in capitalist systems is unproductive in material terms. Consider the administrative overhead of the for-profit health care systems in the US, compared to the simplicity of non-profit/state provided systems. No insurance claims work, no bankruptcies, lawyers, collectors and judges busy dealing with that. No CEOs and other suits on top of the "health care" corporations. No administrative staff for billing people. No victims of the health care system wasting their time dealing with the complexities of the bills dropped on them.
This is just one example of how the profit motive introduces enormous waste, placing demands of further needless labor from people in a society. The idea that capitalism promotes efficiency is just wrong.
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This is blatantly untrue. There are four countries that still publicly claim to be Marxist-Leninist* (China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam). It is legal to obtain HRT and GRS in China and Cuba and (in Cuba the government provides it for free as part of their state based healthcare system) and transgender people can legally change their gender in both of those countries. The Vietnamese government is current discussing legalising HRT and SRS and providing citizens a way to legally change their gender. Bizarrely I couldn't find any information about Laos' laws regarding transpeople.
I'm not going to pretend that Communist countries are or were all sunshine and rainbows when it comes to LGBT rights. But most of the problems and discrimination that arose in Communist countries were the same ones encountered in Capitalist countries at the same time. And the victories of the LGBT community were not a natural consequence of Capitalism, but because of the hard work and advocacy of LGBT civil rights activists, many of whom identified or still identify as far-Left and anti-Capitalist. And most of the countries where homosexuality is explicitly punishable by long term imprisonment and/or the death penalty are explicitly anti-Communist and pro-Capitalist. Funny that.
* (North Korea removed all references to Communism in their constitution in 2009. I also excluded Nepal, in which Communist parties won elections ran the country from 2008-2013 and from 2017-now).
Information about Laos is hard to find in general. Though culturally Lao understanding of transgenderness would be quite close to Thai understanding of transgenderness which is very different to contemporary Western understanding. Can't be bothered to google the exact situation in my native language. In any case I think it's fair to say that trans people being viewed as "wanting extra resources provided by the state" is quite off the mark.
Zardnaar
Deity
They got the techniques and drugs from elsewhere, they didn't develop it by themselves.
Racism etc is independent of economic system. Yeah sure theoretically communication might be better but theoretically capitalism's invisible hand will mean rational beings will do what's best.
Both are amoral IMHO in regards to social stuff.
Communism requires voluntary buy in. If you force it on people it's going to fail hard.
Communust Cuba
My economically depressed town I grew up in.
How about a small town population approx 4000. Mother's/grandparents home town used to swim in the water behind the lady in the clip.
Do I need to dig up video on North Korea. How about Maps great leap forward and cultural revolution.
How about Stalin deliberately starving the Ukraine in peacetime?
Khmer Rouge murdering 1 in 3 of there own population?
But but that's not Communism. Well how do you think you're going to impose it if the population doesn't want it?
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amadeus
Serenity now
Now how does this work with something like production inputs? The toothbrush is an easier example because it has “one” production input, plastic. (I’m sure toothbrush production is more complicated, I’m just oversimplifying to explain the concepts.)
Suppose we already know the adult-sized toothbrush production level necessary to supply the world in any given year is 25 billion units. I’m going to guess that’s roughly 4 per year per adult.
First, we need our factory. How big should it be? Is there going to be one giant factory for the whole world, or will each major population center have a factory? We’ll leave that question for now.
Second, we need our production input, plastic. Plastic comes from oil, and we can’t build an oil well anywhere, it has to come from where the oil is. There’s lots of oil in Arabia, so should we put the refining and manufacturing of plastic close to the source of oil, or should the oil be shipped off in tankers to refineries elsewhere? I guess that’s another question to be left out there.
Third, we need to produce our toothbrushes. That means putting the bristles in. Are the bristles produced in-house or are they sent from another factory? If they’re being brought in from outside, how do they get to the factory? Should they be sent on a truck? A railcar? A ship? By helicopter? Probably not by helicopter. Well, neither here nor there.
Where does all of that information come in communism? Since you have abolished the profit and loss system, there are no more price signals that convey that important information.
My understanding is communists are quite open about making use of the material advancement made under capitalism. In fact, I think that is the whole point.
That sort of goes for any economic or political system doesn't it? It's all carrots and sticks at the end of the day.
