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

[Commodore]

Calling societies for socialist or capitalist is rather pointless and problematic since it is a massive simplification. Same thing you can't really call all medieval societies for feudal because they was different.

Instead you have to look deep into each society and see how they work and also ask questions such as if this is practical for other societies and why/why not.

Of course. But calling a society capitalist, socialist or whatever else is just shorthand for "a society in which (insert ism) is the dominant/core ideology".

 

[Traitorfish]

Compare that to something like "pure capitalism", which also doesn't exist.

That's a bit like saying "pure spiders" don't exist. "Capitalism" is not an abstract model to which really-existing things exist in greater or less proximity, it's a category into which really-existing things are placed.

Concepts like "capitalism" and "socialism" aren't expected to imply an exhaustive description of what a society looks like, they're supposed to identify the basic economic logic on which that society operates. It should be expected that we will see significant differences between capitalist societies, or any other kind of society, because human beings in different circumstances will inevitably build different things on top of that basic economic logic.

 

[El_Machinae]

No my premise is that it has been adopted and has failed many times. I also disagree that those failures were caused solely by outside pressure and not because of inherent flaws in the ideology itself.

You're right, I meant "failed to thrive" or "successfully adopted". But your disagreement doesn't matter, since there WERE powerful outside forces arrayed to prevent the success. After that, it's just unpacking the relative contribution towards the failure.

I'm not disagreeing that it's probably infeasible. I'm disagreeing that we have sufficient evidence from history to have a definitive opinion.

 

[Crezth]

Something I’ve noticed when people bring up socialist experiments and gauge them as such is they don’t tend to look at how countries which transitioned away from socialism are doing. Supposedly, if capitalism is so much more robust than socialism, we’d expect to see these countries “bounce back” into something investment bankers could approve of.

But you take the case of Russia and what you have instead of a robust industrial economy is a totally depressed petrostate, as illiberal as it is possible to be, fully cartelized by robber barons who actually literally pillaged the public coffers - all in the name of liberalization, of course, but with the effect Russia is now ruled by wealthy pharaohs whose power cannot be ventured in any way the same capacity that the communists’ was. They traded an opaque bureaucratic despotism for a cannibal buffet.

Now I acknowledge we can split hairs on whether the Soviets were “true socialists.” Perhaps they weren’t, perhaps they were truly no different from any anti-imperialist collectivist bureaucratic state that has been, capitalist or no - but, the privatization of the Soviet state seems to have obliterated any of the benign influences it may have had.

Maybe all this means is we are describing Russia’s transition from a radical anti-western bureaucratic despotism to a vaguely westernized and free market capitalist liberal-style democracy, and what we observe is the liberal became illiberal and the free markets became monopolies.

If capitalism couldn’t retrieve Russia, what else can’t it retrieve?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Russia's transition away from Sovietism was high jacked by the desire for power and money by a few people who saw and opportunity. P-u-t-i-n

 

[Commodore]

Something I’ve noticed when people bring up socialist experiments and gauge them as such is they don’t tend to look at how countries which transitioned away from socialism are doing. Supposedly, if capitalism is so much more robust than socialism, we’d expect to see these countries “bounce back” into something investment bankers could approve of.

But you take the case of Russia and what you have instead of a robust industrial economy is a totally depressed petrostate, as illiberal as it is possible to be, fully cartelized by robber barons who actually literally pillaged the public coffers - all in the name of liberalization, of course, but with the effect Russia is now ruled by wealthy pharaohs whose power cannot be ventured in any way the same capacity that the communists’ was. They traded an opaque bureaucratic despotism for a cannibal buffet

Counterpoint: China. They may still call themselves communist, but they have fully embraced capitalism and went from being a large, but backwards nation to a serious threat to the current world order. As much as I dislike the current Chinese government, I will still point to them as another capitalist success story.

 

[red_elk]

Russia's transition away from Sovietism <to hellhole> was high jacked...

FTFY

 

[Crezth]

Counterpoint: China. They may still call themselves communist, but they have fully embraced capitalism and went from being a large, but backwards nation to a serious threat to the current world order. As much as I dislike the current Chinese government, I will still point to them as another capitalist success story.

Well that really is the point I was making. Bear with me. What if the Soviets had transitioned to a free market economy slowly and not quickly and suddenly as per Gorbachev’s plan? What if they had executed a Dengist reform scheme that gradually opened the country up and elaborately laid the foundations of that growth?

The Soviets moved too quickly and hit too many road bumps to recover. It sent the Soviet system into a death spiral with the effect of overthrowing that system of government and ending the Soviet control of the economy. The resulting capitalist smorgasbord was no-holds barred and instituted among the sudden imposition of liberal-style democracy.

My proposal is it is exactly because they lost that strong bureaucratic despotism and became a liberal free-for-all that Russia transformed into the miserable state it is today.

In China nothing similar occurred. The Dengist reforms were ultimately sweeping, but the Communist Party was meticulously careful to maintain control of all the levels of state. There was capitalist reform but thoroughly without any kind of western democracy and without even a great deal of economic freedom beyond what was allowed. The state retained control of major industries and endeavored to “raise up” a business class under its watchful eye. The effect of this was not only a capitalist boom, but the Communist Party keeping control. The man who rules China now did not battle for the crown in a howling slog, like Putin did, he navigated the complex politics of a disciplined clique of rulers.

We observe two things:

1. Liberalism is not remotely necessary for capitalism to proceed with development.

2. Liberal democracy gave way to illiberal democracy at the pleasure of a newly wealthy capitalist ruling class.

It would seem that capitalism is plenty illiberal of its own. There are liberal capitalist democracies but what is the greatest threat to liberalism in those countries? Nothing other than the outsized influence of the wealthy on politics - the creation of political inequality between the wealthy and the poor, in a system that to “work” relies on all people being politically equal. It is a self-defeating prospect. It is a prospect we have already seen come to pass in the world’s oldest liberal capitalist democracy.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I think that China used capitalism to speed up the development and increase the size of it middle class and consumer growth.

 

[aelf]

The "executive team" you have described - that is a committee! Specifically it is an executive committee, appointed to make decisions for the running of a company. Sometimes this committee includes the owner, sometimes it is appointed by the owner(s), but it is always a group of people making decisions.

Of course you are right, in a very diverse marketplace you have many competing committees which survive or die on the laws of trade and profit. But what we also observe is that these marketplaces yield before the formation of large businesses, which warp the marketplace around them. When a large corporation like say Gap Inc. decides what clothing it's going to make, it has such a large margin of error that it only needs to keep track of the performance of a handful of competitors, outside of localities that it has established local monopolies in and, thus, guaranteed the capture of the market in those areas. The Gap decides what shirts to make and sell and in what quantities based on the findings of analysts, who look at past consumption and attempt to discern major trends.

In truth, the competition for Gap that drives them to make shirts people "want" is mitigated by two factors:

1. Is selling shirts to more people the indication of success, or merely extracting more profits from the marketplace?

2. The Gap's managers must decide what to make even in noncompetitive marketplaces, where there are no market signals.

The only point here being that just because the structure in which these decisions are being made is a capitalist marketplace does not actually mean the most competitive or most efficient options are being selected.

We can separate consumption from marketplaces as such. The designers who have proved themselves designing clothes can still design clothes, sometimes even exotic designs; the distributors who have proved themselves capable of moving product will continue to move product; the executives who have proved themselves capable of determining the clothing production quotas that result in the least waste will also continue to do so. The marketplace of "choice" is inherent in industrial abundance.

I don't even think the market itself is the mechanism that moves production in a private enterprise. Perceived market conditions at a particular point in time merely act as a signalling mechanism for supply and pricing decisions. At best, executives are responding to a simulacrum of the market, and different groups can have different simulacra at the same time. It's just the usual decision-making based on incomplete available data that are often not real - not too different from a committee not made up of people with inflated MBAs.

Any halfway intimate knowledge of microeconomics and business management would tell people this. Which brings me back to the point that it's impossible to discuss Marxism, socialism or even any critique of capitalism with people who don't have a decent grasp of economics.

 

[red_elk]

Gorbachov reforms were step in right direction IMO - introducing regulated market economy and keeping socialism. But they were too late, poorly executed and failed to prevent country's collapse. After "geopolitical catastrophe" of 90-s, Putin was actually one of the best outcomes what we could realistically expect. His methods deserve criticism, but he has done a lot for the country. Ended war in Chechnya, doubled GDP in first decade, dramatically improved living standards. If he manages to do the next great thing - leave before turning into Brezhnev 2.0, he will be remembered as one of the greatest Russian rulers.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I don't even think the market itself is the mechanism that moves production in a private enterprise. Perceived market conditions at a particular point in time merely act as a signalling mechanism for supply and pricing decisions. At best, executives are responding to a simulacrum of the market, and different groups can have different simulacra at the same time. It's just the usual decision-making based on incomplete available data that are often not real - not too different from a committee not made up of people with inflated MBAs.

Any halfway intimate knowledge of microeconomics and business management would tell people this. Which brings me back to the point that it's impossible to discuss Marxism, socialism or even any critique of capitalism with people who don't have a decent grasp of economics.

You are clueless about how business actually works. All data is incomplete but that does not mean it is wrong. I would say in reply that is difficult to discuss socialism or capitalism without a basic knowledge of how business and society actually interact in the real world on a day to day basis.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

I think that China used capitalism to speed up the development and increase the size of it middle class and consumer growth.

Well China have still a quite long way to go. China in 1990 seems to have had similar GDP per capita as South Korea in 1960, China today have similar GDP per capita as South Korea in 1990 or about the same as Japan in 1960.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=CN-KR-JP-US

The issue is maybe not growth early on but to maintain the momentum, Japan had strong growth but that did not last while US growth rate seems to have been more stable. South Korea growth don't seems to be any faster than US growth at the same gdp per capita. However China unlike Japan or South Korea maybe have the political power to advance beyond being just a trailing economy and eventually reach the GDP per capita of USA.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Well China have still a quite long way to go. China in 1990 seems to have had similar GDP per capita as South Korea in 1960, China today have similar GDP per capita as South Korea in 1990 or about the same as Japan in 1960.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=CN-KR-JP-US

The issue is maybe not growth early on but to maintain the momentum, Japan had strong growth but that did not last while US growth rate seems to have been more stable. South Korea growth don't seems to be any faster than US growth at the same gdp per capita. However China unlike Japan or South Korea maybe have the political power to advance beyond being just a trailing economy and eventually reach the GDP per capita of USA.

The US has about 350 million people. China moved 400 million out of poverty in the past decade. They have another 400 million to go.

 

[sophie]

And again, we've gone off on these bizarro tangents in terms of definition which belies a complete lack of familiarity with Marx, and so it seems utterly pointless to talk about this. Socialism != government interference in stuff, and capitalism != free exchange, market exchange, or even necessarily private business. Like, Marx expounded thousands of pages very carefully describing and detailing the basis for his analysis and what these terms mean within his framework.

I'm not saying that everyone needs to go read the full 1000 pages of Capital before a productive conversation can be had, but as I said way back in the early pages of this thread, I think it would behoove people to at least read Engels' pamphlet: "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," which is a fairly quick read (about 30 pages) and hashes out all of the basics of what is meant by: dialectics, historical materialism, capitalism (incl. how it developed historically), socialism, and why and how socialism will emerge as a natural consequence of the contradictions inherent to capitalism, which is the whole thing. It's basically the sparknotes version of Marxism.

You can read the whole thing here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm, but if you don't, I'd say the most salient point in the present moment is what Marx meant by capitalism (not market exchange, not individual buyers and sellers, not even necessarily the presence of private property), and the best way to understand that is to look at how Capitalism emerged:

Before capitalist production — i.e., in the Middle Ages — the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor — land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a rule to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth section of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how since the 15th century this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the production from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now come out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I made that; this is my product."


This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation.

The first capitalists found, as we have said, alongside of other forms of labor, wage-labor ready-made for them on the market. But it was exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labor. The agricultural laborer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by the day, had a few acres of his own land on which he could at all events live at a pinch. The guilds were so organized that the journeyman of today became the master of tomorrow. But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became socialized and concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as well as the product, of the individual producer became more and more worthless; there was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist. Wage-labor, aforetime the exception and accessory, now became the rule and basis of all production; aforetime complementary, it now became the sole remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker for a time became a wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent was further enormously increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labor-power, on the other. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie.

We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.

But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations — i.e., in exchange — and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers.

In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production was essentially directed toward satisfying the wants of the individual. It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his family. Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the country, it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord. In all this there was, therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as the means of subsistence. Only when it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own wants and the payments in kind to the feudal lords, only then did it also produce commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialized exchange and offered for sale, became commodities.

The artisan in the towns, it is true, had from the first to produce for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of their individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned their cattle out into the communal forest, which, also, yielded them timber and firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for the purpose of exchange, production of commodities, was only in its infancy. Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production stable; there was local exclusiveness without, local unity within; the mark in the country; in the town, the guild.

But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity-production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated producers of commodities. It became apparent that the production of society at large was ruled by absence of plan, by accident, by anarchy; and this anarchy grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this organization of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its side. The field of labor became a battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonization following them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begat, in their turn, national conflicts, the commercial wars of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world-market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from Nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism between the organization of production in the individual workshop and the anarchy of production in society generally.

The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered. What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of planets, by collision with the centre. It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin.

In other words, capitalism isn't free exchange, it isn't open markets, and it isn't competition - indeed the concentration of wealth and monopolization of industry is an intrinsic aspect of capitalism as envisioned by Marx and Engels. Rather, capitalism is, broadly speaking, 3 things:

1) the socialization of productive forces; i.e. a system whereby rather than each individual producing personally according to their own need and acting in effective self-sufficiency, many people are brought together in one area to collectively produce one thing.

2) the emergence of the commodity form. I.e. the transformation of a good from something which is produced in order to be used, into something which is produced in order to be exchanged.

3) M-C-M', i.e. the process of taking money, exchanging that money for a commodity, and then exchanging that commodity for a greater sum of money than the original amount. Capitalism is the process of utilizing developments 1) and 2) in order to achieve 3). And those who are able to to perform M-C-M' transformations are capitalists, while those who aren't - those who instead need to perform C-M-C' exchanges (wherein they sell their body/time as a commodity in exchange for money which they then exchange for a different commodity which they consume) are the proletariat.

As I said, Marx's fundamental theory is that society is driven by material social relations to the means of production. This is, for Marx, the real foundation of any given society. Everything else - religion, government, culture, language, etc., emerges as a consequence of, and in relationship to, that real foundation. Therefore, when Marx talks about Capitalism, he is describing a society which has been arranged to facilitate that M-C-M' transformation. So relating capitalism and socialism to some sort of spectrum wherein government involvement and regulation render a society "less capitalistic" and by consequence "more socialistic," is just false on its face. Irrespective of the level of government involvement, you still have the commodity form. You still have the marshaling of socialized labor power for the purpose of producing for exchange, rather than for use. You still have an entire society built around the facilitation of the M-C-M' transformation. Maybe government regulation can mitigate some degree of the "anarchy" which Engels described, But unless and until the orientation around M-C-M' transformations changes at the foundational level, it's still all capitalism. There is no more or less "capitalistic." It's all the same one thing.

There are a lot of other really interesting aspects of Marxism which emerge as a natural consequence of this original observation, things like alienation, atomization, how other classes relate to this social arrangement, why Marx believed that revolution necessarily had to come from the proletariat, colonialism, etc. And I would love to talk about those things, but it doesn't seem like any of that is possible until we come to an understanding of what Marx - and Marxists - actually mean when they talk about capitalism.

 

[Lexicus]

Russia's transition away from Sovietism was high jacked by the desire for power and money by a few people who saw and opportunity. P-u-t-i-n

It was mismanaged from the start by neoliberal ideologues. That is, you can blame Putin all you want, but the environment that enabled him to take over was baked into the political and economic terms of the transition.

The post-Soviet transition combined with the trajectory of China since the 1990s should really put paid to the idea that "free markets" will necessarily lead to a democratic or even liberal political system.

You are clueless about how business actually works.

What in the post you quote indicates this cluelessness?

 

[Birdjaguar]

@Owen Glyndwr Thanks, I liked your post and read the big quote too! I see no value in quibbling over bits and pieces of what you said and what Engels said because I think both are accurate in what what you want from your post. One sentence from Engels though did jump out at me:

By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended.

This sounds pretty nostalgic for the the good old days.

 

[Lexicus]

This sounds pretty nostalgic for the the good old days.

We've had this same conversation before about Karl Polanyi, and in Engels' case even more than Polanyi's this is a willful misreading of the text. Marx and Engels certainly believed that the destruction of the "old, peaceful, stable condition" was a progressive, or positive, development. And a translation for "old, peaceful, stable" might be "stagnant" or even "regressive."

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

We don't know how sustainable the western economies really are, it may be they only really work due to access to cheap labor from the rest of the world. If somebody in a poor country need to work 10 times the amount of time but produce goods of same quality as the rich country it may not be sustainable because eventually the poor country will demand the same price for the same product.

I suspect much of the gdp per capita difference between west and china is that made in china is seen as a weaker brand than made in a western country, even if the product is of equal quality.

 

[Lexicus]

We don't know how sustainable the western economies really are, it may be they only really work due to access to cheap labor from the rest of the world.

I'd say ignoring/externalizing the costs of carbon pollution is probably the biggest one