Communism, Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, What are your thoughts?

[Lexicus]

a change in governance. It was not a change in any of the national economic underpinnings.

Arbitrary distinction without a difference.

Incrementalism works because folks put forth a specific plan with details about what the results will be.

You're comparing apples and oranges.

Notice what I bolded.

And of course one could ask endless questions about what these new independent states would look like, how they would be run, and so forth, demanding all the details down to the most minute level, just as you have spent dozens of pages of this thread doing.

Notice that the colonists declared the revolution and then answered many of the messy questions about details afterward. Indeed Americans are still arguing about those questions to this day.

 

[El_Machinae]

He asked specific questions. Some people will have no answers. Some people will have different ones. Obviously, some people might have answers but no actual incentive to answer.

It's hard to distinguish between those who don't have an answer and those who don't want to answer, and the best you can do is try to make the question as honest as possible

If there was a specific answer, then the different people who have read Marx might actually disagree with each other.

 

[Birdjaguar]

So "marxism will never catch on" unless we produce a 10,000 page document to address all the minutia like Sub S Corps?

I propose that we could do so and nobody would ever read it. Not gonna waste my time on that.

Someone said it before and no doubt better, but it's not like capitalists were able to describe what the world would look like during the transition from feudalism. They just did it anyway, because it was better*.

*terms and restrictions apply

I am not asking for 10,000 pages of anything. I've been asking for the Marxists on this forum to explain how implementing Marxist theory would manifest itself and affect everyday activities. Sub s is not minutia. There are over 4.6 million of them in the US; over twice the number of C corps. How you treat them will affect millions of workers. I'm certainly not looking to read 10 pages, let alone 10,000 on how housing would work or what guaranteed jobs would work. I'd settle for 10 sentences. But if you cannot even explain what worker ownership means when implemented in the US, you certainly appear ignorant about your topic. As I said above, the questions I posed to Yung are not difficult and don't require much to build out a framework of how things would work.

Capitalism took over incrementally over many decades in different places. Nobody advocated a revolution to implement it. We have it now because when coupled with less repressive government, it produces improved prosperity over the other systems.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Arbitrary distinction without a difference.

so the one page DoI and Marx's work are essentially the same in nature? A declaration of war of independence is no different than destroying one economic system and rebuilding a new one?

You're comparing apples and oranges.

And of course one could ask endless questions about what these new independent states would look like, how they would be run, and so forth, demanding all the details down to the most minute level, just as you have spent dozens of pages of this thread doing.

Notice that the colonists declared the revolution and then answered many of the messy questions about details afterward. Indeed Americans are still arguing about those questions to this day.

So it sounds like you are only talking about a violent revolution to over throw capitalism and not any incremental approach. OK. Yes one could ask lots of questions about what the newly freed colonies would look like after success, but independence did not mean any changes to the daily lives of the people. Independence only meant changing the high level of governance and perhaps how the states organized themselves. Farmers would still farm, taxes would be paid, commerce would follow the same path as before independence. The US revolution is not similar at all to what Marxists want. You want to change how people live their daily lives and you are unwilling or unable to describe what that new life would be like beyond mouthing meaningless platitudes.

 

[sophie]

Marxism isn't a programme, and until you understand that basic fact, there's really no way to move forward productively.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Marxism isn't a programme, and until you understand that basic fact, there's really no way to move forward productively.

It's a lifestyle? Whatever it is then, if you cannot explain its endgame and what that looks like, then it is just a word game.

 

[sophie]

It's a lifestyle? Whatever it is then, if you cannot explain its endgame and what that looks like, then it is just a word game.

I have explained it to you in detail. Others have as well. I've also told you resources you could read if you can't be bothered to read our posts. I've also linked directly to those resources. Until you are willing to listen to us when we explain this stuff, there's really no point in continuing participating in this thread. I'm just banging my head against a wall.

But that said, to answer the question again, Marxism is an analytical framework for examining and understanding Capitalism, and for arriving at strategies which will be most effective in overthrowing it, and finally, for developing means which which Communism, which is defined as the negation/transcendence beyond Capitalism, can be arrived at.

But none of that can mean anything to you until you take the time to actually understand the analytical and theoretical tools from which the theory derives.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Own the means of production...the notion of for every Company or Enterprise to give a % share of stock to every single workers, and with that also give them a modicum of decision-power and ownership.

That doesn't mean anything unless you go much deeper.

1. Does production mean manufacturing only?
2. Does it include service businesses? How about retail?
3. Does employee stock ownership only apply to public companies? How about Sub S corporations? How about a private stock company or LLC with only 10 employees? Sole proprietorship?
4. Do employees get ownership the day they are hired or is there a vesting period?
5. Do all of the currently available company forming options go away and get replaced by something else?
6. How are employee owned shares allocated? Who decides when an employee gets fired and what happens to their shares?

Unless you can explain how these types of questions get answered and who in real life would make the decisions on how they get answered, you don't actually have even an inkling of a plan. Changing economic systems is complicated and while one cannot answer every question ahead of time, advocates for change have to be able to explain what the new system will actually look like and and how the changes will impact people. Marxism and wholesale socialism will continue to fail to capture public support until they can explain what their new world order will actually look like. Incrementalism works because folks put forth a specific plan with details about what the results will be. UBI, SS, and M4A gain traction because they are clearly understood and the anticipated outcomes are persuasive enough that many people say "OK". Marxist need to be able to do the same for every aspect of their ideas. If you can't, you will fail.

I have explained it to you in detail. Others have as well. I've also told you resources you could read if you can't be bothered to read our posts. I've also linked directly to those resources. Until you are willing to listen to us when we explain this stuff, there's really no point in continuing participating in this thread. I'm just banging my head against a wall.

I posed six questions earlier today. With your understanding of Marxism, can you answer any of them and provide a couple of sentences for the answers you you give? I'm not looking for minute details; paint your answers with a broad brush. Help me understand what employee ownership would actually mean.

EDIT: I have read your links. None of them addressed the fundamental questions of how you would change what exists now into something else.

 

[sophie]

That doesn't mean anything unless you go much deeper.

1. Does production mean manufacturing only?
2. Does it include service businesses? How about retail?
3. Does employee stock ownership only apply to public companies? How about Sub S corporations? How about a private stock company or LLC with only 10 employees? Sole proprietorship?
4. Do employees get ownership the day they are hired or is there a vesting period?
5. Do all of the currently available company forming options go away and get replaced by something else?
6. How are employee owned shares allocated? Who decides when an employee gets fired and what happens to their shares?

1. No.
2. Yes.
3. No, though if you're running a business and you're the only worker, then you obviously own 100% of the "company." Once you hire someone else, they become a part-owner
4. Depends on the material conditions of the society in question
5. Depends on the material conditions of the society in question
6. Depends on the material conditions of the society in question

But again, these questions are absurd within a Marxist framework. I'm begging you, take the one and a half hours necessary to read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Like this discussion cannot continue unless and until you are prepared to engage with the actual theoretical principles upon which Marxism is based.

 

[Birdjaguar]

1. No.
2. Yes.
3. No, though if you're running a business and you're the only worker, then you obviously own 100% of the "company." Once you hire someone else, they become a part-owner
4. Depends on the material conditions of the society in question
5. Depends on the material conditions of the society in question
6. Depends on the material conditions of the society in question

But again, these questions are absurd within a Marxist framework. I'm begging you, take the one and a half hours necessary to read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Like this discussion cannot continue unless and until you are prepared to engage with the actual theoretical principles upon which Marxism is based.

You have posted that link before, and I read it before. But I read it again anyway. I understand what he is saying and he gives his explanation for the state of the world at the end of the 19th c. So do you want to engage in a debate about Marxist theory and not one about how its implementation would actually affect people? I'm not disputing Marxist theory; I just want to know what it would mean if you had license to implement it. That is the question you all seem to run away from.

BTW, your non answers are more than what others have offered, so thanks for that. I see that you equate one word to "a couple of sentences".

 

[Lexicus]

so the one page DoI and Marx's work are essentially the same in nature? A declaration of war of independence is no different than destroying one economic system and rebuilding a new one?

Yes, Marxism is basically an extension of the same Enlightenment principles on which the Declaration is based, using them to critique the despotism of capital instead of the despotism of absolute monarchy.
Why else would Marx send a congratulatory letter to Lincoln for continuing the work laid out in the Declaration?

That is the question you all seem to run away from.

There are many, many tangible examples of worker-controlled enterprises, countries with universal health care, companies with collective bargaining agreements, countries where workers have representation on corporate boards, and on and on, yet you are essentially pretending none of this exists and asking us to reinvent the wheel constantly.

It is increasingly obvious that you are not asking questions out out of a desire to actually learn anything, that you will never be satisfied with any answers you receive, and that even if you get answers you will just be asking the same questions again in a few days.

Help me understand what employee ownership would actually mean.

https://www.nceo.org/what-is-employee-ownership#:~:text=Employee ownership is a term,can serve many different goals.

 

[Birdjaguar]

There are many, many tangible examples of worker-controlled enterprises, countries with universal health care, companies with collective bargaining agreements, countries where workers have representation on corporate boards, and on and on, yet you are essentially pretending none of this exists and asking us to reinvent the wheel constantly.

It is increasingly obvious that you are not asking questions out out of a desire to actually learn anything, that you will never be satisfied with any answers you receive, and that even if you get answers you will just be asking the same questions again in a few days.

https://www.nceo.org/what-is-employee-ownership#:~:text=Employee ownership is a term,can serve many different goals.

I do agree that there are many examples of worker owned entities and worker participation in high level decision making and even linked to site on ESOPs. So is that what you are recommending for the US? Those are all incremental steps and I don't have any objections to them. The more the better, but they exist within our current capitalist framework. That is not introducing a Marxist/socialist agenda institutionally across an entire economy. Why have none of you said: We will make every company and ESOP!
Will mandatory ESOP status mean unions can go away?
Will currently public companies disappear and become private ESOPs?
What happens to the thousands and thousands of non profit companies that exist?

 

[Hygro]

So "marxism will never catch on" unless we produce a 10,000 page document to address all the minutia like Sub S Corps?

I propose that we could do so and nobody would ever read it. Not gonna waste my time on that.

Someone said it before and no doubt better, but it's not like capitalists were able to describe what the world would look like during the transition from feudalism. They just did it anyway, because it was better*.

*terms and restrictions apply

Capitalists did the transition step by step without declaring a desire to “end feudalism”. It took a long time and grew out of institutions that existed in the previous paradigm.

 

[El_Machinae]

No, the position is that reforms are self-defeating, insofar as reforms that reduce the profitability of the system will lead capitalists to simply disinvest, which can cause the economy to contract even more sharply than the problems which the reforms are designed to solve.

There are many, many tangible examples of worker-controlled enterprises, countries with universal health care, companies with collective bargaining agreements, countries where workers have representation on corporate boards, and on and on, yet you are essentially pretending none of this exists and asking us to reinvent the wheel constantly.

Can you reconcile these? I'm trying to figure out this part. Do these partial fixes stabilize the system? lead to further imbalance? delay the collapse? whatever?

I'm trying to get a feel for what's deemed an incremental improvement: both in delaying an apocalypse and increasing current or future quality of life.

 

[Lexicus]

Can you reconcile these? I'm trying to figure out this part. Do these partial fixes stabilize the system? lead to further imbalance? delay the collapse? whatever?

I'm trying to get a feel for what's deemed an incremental improvement: both in delaying an apocalypse and increasing current or future quality of life.

What is there to reconcile? Bear in mind the first quote is describing a position, not taking a position.

I think most Marxists would agree that something like expropriating current business owners and handing their businesses over to their workers would be a revolutionary program, not a reformist one. Worker ownership is a term that encompasses many different outcomes, and many different paths to those outcomes.

 

[El_Machinae]

I guess the question I'm seeing is that there have been a series of successful reforms that we can see, but how can we call them successes if they're fundamentally self-defeating? And is there evidence they are?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Since our resident Marxists have been mostly uncooperative, I went searching on my own for what Marx said about implementing his ideas. I did find one site that was dedicated to that very idea. There is a link at the bottom.

Marx's Vision of Communism
By Bertell Ollman

Notwithstanding Marx's own practice and contrary to his implicit warning, in what follows I have tried to reconstruct Marx's vision of communism from his writings of 1844, the year in which he set down the broad lines of his analysis, to the end of his life. Assembling these varied comments the communist society falls into place like the picture on a puzzle. It is a picture in which many pieces are missing and other so vague as to be practically undecipherable. Yet, what is left is a more complete and coherent whole than most people have thought to exist. Despite some serious temptations, I have not gone beyond Marx's actual words in piecing together the components of the communist society. Gaps and uncertainties are left untouched. On occasion, however, when all the evidence points to a particular conclusion, I am not averse to stating it.

Marx divides the communist future into halves, a first stage generally referred to as the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and a second stage usually called "full communism." The historical boundaries of the first stage are set in the claim that: "Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."6

The overall character of this period is supplied by Marx's statement that "What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society: which is thus in every respect still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges."7 This first stage is the necessary gestation period for full communism: is it as time when the people who have destroyed capitalism are engaged in the task of total reconstruction. As a way of life and organization it has traits in common with both capitalism and full communism and Marx never indicates how long this may take—the first stage gives way gradually almost imperceptibly to the second.

Our main sources of Marx's views on the dictatorship of the proletariat are the Communist Manifesto, the "Critique of the Gotha Program," and "Civil War in France," in which he discusses the reforms of the Paris Commune. In the Communist Manifesto, there are ten measures that workers' parties are urged to put into effect immediately after their victory over the capitalists. By viewings these measures are already accomplished, we can use this list as a basis for our picture of the first stage.

What Marx asks for are: "1) Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2) A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3) Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4) Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5) Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6) Centralization of communication and transport in the hands of the state. 7) Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing in cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8) Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9) Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of population over the country. 10) Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc."8

It is conceded that "these measures will of course differ in different countries," but in the most advanced countries they "will be pretty generally applicable." No matter the variation in means, and it appears these variations would be modest ones, the goals remain the same: "to wrest... all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state... and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible."

There is much more here and lots of detail that any knowledgeable Marxist could have summarized. The article is quite long and is easy reading. His goal was to explain and not preach.

https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/vision_of_communism.php

tldr: Marx's second stage is a pure Utopian dream without any basis on reality. His first stage, the transition from capitalism to something better, relies on a quick and complete revolution across the world and not any incremental process. This stage has no set length,so one can assume that there would never be a second stage. Much of what he thought is quite dated now and the writer does make an effort to bring Marx's thinking into the the 20th C at least. There is enough information here to actually have a conversation about what happens during the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat".

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Moderator Action: I have deleted a number of posts as they were attack posts. Please refrain from attacking each other and instead, discuss the topic at hand. I know, what a concept!

 

[sophie]

I don't know how many more times I'm going to have to tell you this.

Marxism is not a programme. It's not a road map. It's not a step-by-step guide for how to get to his special utopian vision of the future. This sort of thinking is actually antithetical to Marxism. It is precisely this sort of liberal schematizing, characteristic of the Utopian socialists, which Marx was trying to replace with a robust theory. Until you are willing to grapple with the actual theoretical underpinnings which guide Marxism - dialectics and historical materialism - there really is no way that you're ever going to move towards an understanding of what any of this actually is, and therefore there's no point in engaging further.

 

[Zardnaar]

I don't know how many more times I'm going to have to tell you this.

Marxism is not a programme. It's not a road map. It's not a step-by-step guide for how to get to his special utopian vision of the future. This sort of thinking is actually antithetical to Marxism. It is precisely this sort of liberal schematizing, characteristic of the Utopian socialists, which Marx was trying to replace with a robust theory. Until you are willing to grapple with the actual theoretical underpinnings which guide Marxism - dialectics and historical materialism - there really is no way that you're ever going to move towards an understanding of what any of this actually is, and therefore there's no point in engaging further.

Marx was a philosopher not an economist. In the 1830s.

There's nothing there worth using. It's pie in the sky wishy washy wish list.

It will never work because of humans and you can achieve something similar under a social democratic model in the real world.

You can't impose it by force and you would need the whole world to do it.