Relationship of Marxism to Progressive Policies and the Virtues or Risks Thereof

[catsmate]

Some of the most ardent Adamists I've read over the years obviously never read what he actually wrote. Very much like many ardent Marxists.

Absolutely. This is true of many movements based around the book of the One True Way.
Randies, for example, rarely read what she actually wrote, the incoherent nonsense reveals itself quickly.

I can quote from Marx and Smith, Bible and Quran,and many others, because I've read them. This tends to annoy the True Believers with their facile and superficial understanding.

 

[jimbob]

From my perspective, when we talk about privilege we are simply talking about the advantages of one's birth. I'm privileged to be born white in the US where being born white in China it might not be a privilege. As I am being male, healthy and straight. It's also a privilege to grow up in Newport, Rhode Island or Medina, WA or Malibu or Santa Barbara, California. It's a privilege to have received a quality education. It's also a privilege to be well fed and dressed. These were all privileges that others may not have.

John Scalzi wrote a blog post about this saying it's playing life on easy mode.

“Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting,” Ten Years On

Ten years ago this week I thought I would write a piece to offer a useful metaphor for straight white male privilege without using the word “privilege,” because when you use the word “privilege,” s…

whatever.scalzi.com

 

[dann]

Marxism isn’t socialism.

It is, actually.

Scientific socialism (Wikipedia)
Scientific socialism in Marxism is the application of historical materialism to the development of socialism, as not just a practical and achievable outcome of historical processes, but the only possible outcome. It contrasts with utopian socialism by basing itself upon material conditions instead of concoctions and ideas, where "the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch."

A major problem with your statement is that there are many kinds of socialism, most of them not scientific.
And there are many kinds of Marxism, most of them based on Marx in name only.

It would be wrong to claim that what RFK Jr. & Co. are trying to establish isn't healthcare. It is, but it sure as hell isn't science-based medicine. It's healthcare the same way that what Hahnemann preached and practiced was healthcare.
Your statement is like turning it around and claiming that science-based medicine isn't healthcare because it obviously isn't what NIH is being turned into.

 

[dann]

I think it's best to first look at Marx the man. He was slothful, useless, always bumming others for money. So he created a whole political/economic philosophy that justified his sloth as good. So sad that so many had to suffer because of that twat.

Did you even read the letter - in its entirety? I don't think you did because you didn't even bother to link to the lettter, which makes you appear to be slothful. In fact, you don't even consider if the letter is actually addressed to "Marx the man" (it isn't) or to Marx, the teenager (it is).
It is a letter from a father to his teenage son accusing him of being a spoilt brat, albeit one endowed with "magnificent talents."
You haven't even tried to find out what exactly the alleged "Marx the man" is supposed to have done to upset his father. The letter doesn't make it clear. What is young Marx's "first disappointed wish"? What is the "embitterment" that it is supposed to have evoked?
The whole point of your post is: 'Marx's father blamed his son for something. I can use that to put him down!'
Could your post possibly be any more useless than that?

This is an example of attacking the arguer instead of the argument.

You are right. It couldn't possibly be any more ad hominem than this. And even as ad hominem, it's completely off the mark.


ETA: I began to wonder what Heinrich Marx was so upset about, so I took a look at some of his other letters to his son:

Letter from Heinrich Marx to son Karl - Written: Trier, December 9, 1837 (Marxists)
God's grief!!! Disorderliness, musty excursions into all departments of knowledge, musty brooding under a gloomy oil-lamp; running wild in a scholar's dressing-gown and with unkempt hair instead of running wild over a glass of beer; unsociable withdrawal with neglect of all decorum and even of all consideration for the father. -- The art of association with the world restricted to a dirty work-room, in the classic disorder of which perhaps the love-letters of a Jenny and the well-meant exhortations of a father, written perhaps with tears, are used for pipe-spills, which at any rate would be better than if they were to fall into the hands of third persons owing to even more irresponsible disorder. -- And is it here, in this workshop of senseless and inexpedient erudition, that the fruits are to ripen which will refresh you and your beloved, and the harvest to be garnered which will serve to fulfil your sacred obligations!?
(...)
Hardly were your wild goings-on in Bonn over, hardly were your old sins wiped out -- and they were truly manifold -- when, to our dismay, the pangs of love set in, and with the good nature of parents in a romantic novel we became their heralds and the bearers of their cross. But deeply conscious that your life's happiness was centred here, we tolerated what could not be altered and perhaps ourselves played unbecoming roles. While still so young, you became estranged from your family, but seeing with parents' eyes the beneficial influence on you, we hoped to see the good effects speedily developed, because in point of fact reflection and necessity equally testified in favour of this. But what were the fruits we harvested?

It still doesn't make clear what exactly the "wild goings-on in Bonn" were, but I think it may have been this since it took place in Karl's teenage years, which ended in 1838:

How Young Karl Marx Got Radicalized (Jacobin, Dec 26, 2023)
After writing some mediocre poetry in his teenage years and then delving into philosophy (along with drinking and dueling) as a university student, twenty-four-year-old Marx found himself employed as an editor at the Rheinische Zeitung newspaper. The paper was a joint project of wealthy liberals and the Young Hegelians, the energetic philosophical current that included Marx and many of his friends. It was here that Marx was thrust out of the realm of abstract philosophy and into the work of practical journalism, which would open his eyes to the reality of class conflict.

 

[acbytesla]

John Scalzi wrote a blog post about this saying it's playing life on easy mode.

“Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting,” Ten Years On

Ten years ago this week I thought I would write a piece to offer a useful metaphor for straight white male privilege without using the word “privilege,” because when you use the word “privilege,” s…

whatever.scalzi.com

I like his metaphor. But his argument that wealth isn't a huge advantage every step of the way is patently absurd. There's a pile of factors that "lower the difficulty setting" on life. No single factor or even all the factors combined can imagine ever eliminates all the difficulties of life. But I'll take wealthy and good looking over everything. Maybe because I'm neither.

I can't help but think of Summertine, that Gershwin tune from Porgy and Bess. "Your daddy is rich and your mom is good looking so little baby, don't you cry"

Still, I get that the difficulty level for me was set lower than a poor black child from the projects in Baltimore.

 

[dann]

Out of curiosity, have you read Das Kapital? That Marx was highly complimentary of capitalism in it?

No, he wasn't. I don't think you have read Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie.

Do you get that the Communist rebellion was a result of the massive abuses of capitalism and the inhumane conditions caused by the industrial revolution? And that the Soviet Socialist Republic didn't actually reflect what Marx wrote.

Yes, the Russian revolution was indeed the result of "the inhumane conditions caused by the industrial revolution," the kind of conditions that Marx and Engels had observed in England and analyzed in Capital. A similar implementation of capitalism was taking place in Russia leading up to the revolution. It was capitalism. It wasn't any more or less "abuses (!) of capitalism" than what had taken and was taking place elsewhere.
And yes, it "didn't actually reflect what Marx wrote," but Marx didn't write any handbook about how to make a revolution.

Marx was right about a lot and wrong about a lot. Like us all.

Marx was wrong about very little after he began to analyze capitalism.

 

[dann]

Who advocates for Marxism these days?

I do.

Are there any parties in the "west" (that have any significant electoral success, there will always be 10 person political parties) that want to install anything like a Marxist system? To me railing against Marxism these days is as quaint as railing against the Corn laws.

Argumentum ad populum while at the same time limiting the 'populum' to not only "parties in the "west"" but also to successful parties in the West only, I.e. appeal to popularity.

Marxism had its time and like all ideologies it failed to achieve its end goal.

Has Marxism achieved its end goal? No, obviously not! There is no actual communist society.
Has capitalism achieved its end goal?
What is (and was!) the end goal of capitalism, i.e. the ideology of capitalism, liberalism and its modern version, neoliberalism?
Is the end goal of capitalism what people took to the streets to protest against yesterday?

 

[steenkh]

Repaying the loan destroys the money that was created.

That is not what I understood when reading about. I could be wrong, though.

 

[Darat]

I do.

Argumentum ad populum while at the same time limiting the 'populum' to not only "parties in the "west"" but also to successful parties in the West only, I.e. appeal to popularity.

Nope - it is a statement, not an argument.

Has Marxism achieved its end goal? No, obviously not! There is no actual communist society.
Has capitalism achieved its end goal?
What is (and was!) the end goal of capitalism, i.e. the ideology of capitalism, liberalism and its modern version, neoliberalism?
Is the end goal of capitalism what people took to the streets to protest against yesterday?

Marxism and capitalism are both ideologies that do not model human behaviour accurately, therefore they will never achieve their "end goals" as they are flawed models.

 

[dann]

They really should read their Adam Smith, he certainly didn't believe such nonsense.

One of the great things about Capital, Vol. 1, is that Marx quotes extensively from the works of Adam Smith. He does so with all the economists he criticizes - and even more so in Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (IIRC; it was 50 years ago).

Das Kapital (Wikipedia)
In developing his critique, Marx synthesised and critiqued three main intellectual traditions: the classical political economy of thinkers like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the German idealist philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and French socialist thought. His dialectical method aimed to uncover the internal contradictions and historical transience of capitalism. A key theme is commodity fetishism, the process by which the social relations of production are obscured and appear as objective, natural relations between things.

 

[dann]

Nope - it is a statement, not an argument.

It is an argument against Marxism that you now pretend is nothing but a statement.

Marxism and capitalism are both ideologies that do not model human behaviour accurately, therefore they will never achieve their "end goals" as they are flawed models.

Marxism is an analysis of capitalism/capital, hence the name of Marx's magnum opus.
Capitalism is a mode of production not a model, not even a flawed one. There are several ideologies defending capitalism. Many of those ideologies pretend that capitalism is inherent in human biology, the realization of human nature.
E.g. Social Darwinism (Wikipedia).

 

[dann]

Repaying the loan destroys the money that was created.

That is not what I understood when reading about. I could be wrong, though.

Money is in principle an IOU, a contract. It used to be so literally. Nowadays, you wouldn't usually refer to an IOU as money even though it represents value and can be traded as such.
When the loan is paid back, the IOU is no longer valid. If it exists in paper form, it is often literally destroyed, but at that point it has stopped being more than paper. The value it represented has been returned, usually with interest if it is a capitalist transaction.

 

[steenkh]

The value it represented has been returned, usually with interest if it is a capitalist transaction.

The interest is then money that has been created and not destroyed?

 

[Darat]

It is an argument against Marxism that you now pretend is nothing but a statement.

Nope it was not an argument against Marxism, it was a statement about the current political landscape. There was no criticism of Marxism in that part of my post.

My criticism of Marxism came in the next part the "Marxism had its time and like all ideologies it failed to achieve its end goal."

The data supports that argument.

Marxism is an analysis of capitalism/capital, hence the name of Marx's magnum opus.
Capitalism is a mode of production not a model, not even a flawed one. There are several ideologies defending capitalism. Many of those ideologies pretend that capitalism is inherent in human biology, the realization of human nature.
E.g. Social Darwinism (Wikipedia).

Marxism went beyond being an analysis of capitalism, to claim it wasn't and/or isn't a political ideology seems frankly incredible to me. And yes that would be the fallacy of an argument from personal incredulity - if I was putting it forward as a logical argument to support my conclusion. But I wasn't. I was stating my opinion.

 

[Darat]

There are more economic systems than OG Marxism and hyper capitalism

I agree, but with a caveat: there is no economic theory - which is usually what people base their economic system on - that can predict human behaviour, so it will never work as claimed.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

The interest is then money that has been created and not destroyed?

That's destroyed to. The money that was used to pay the interest and any fees on the loan was probably also money created from a loan that the person ultimately ended up with.

E.g., Her employer paid her wage from revenue generated from goods sold to a builder who did some work on a house that the home-owner paid him for with money from a bank loan.

Most money (~90%) in the economy is of this type. Only the government, via its central bank, can inject more money into the economy. Even most of that will be destroyed by tax. Private debt swamps government debt.

 

[dann]

The interest is then money that has been created and not destroyed?

Created, stolen, saved, whatever. To the creditor, the owner of the money lent to the loan taker, i.e. the debtor, the interest, the value added to the original amount of money, appears to have been created by letting the money 'work'. Where it comes from is of no concern to the creditor.

 

[dann]

Nope it was not an argument against Marxism, it was a statement about the current political landscape. There was no criticism of Marxism in that part of my post.
My criticism of Marxism came in the next part the "Marxism had its time and like all ideologies it failed to achieve its end goal."
The data supports that argument.

Did anybody claim that it had achieved its end goal? Is it a serious argument against anything to say that it has "failed to achieve its end goal"? SETI, for instance? Or a sterilizing vaccine against COVID-19?

Marxism went beyond being an analysis of capitalism, to claim it wasn't and/or isn't a political ideology seems frankly incredible to me. And yes that would be the fallacy of an argument from personal incredulity - if I was putting it forward as a logical argument to support my conclusion. But I wasn't. I was stating my opinion.

So let us pretend that you were just stating your opinion even though it was in response to The Great Zaganza's post in an attempt to dismiss it:
Your opinion was still wrong, and I have argued against it.
By the way, you never answered this question from a related thread:

But I am curious to hear what you mean when you talk about communism "as the theory describes it." Which theory are you referring to?

 

[dann]

The problem I have with Marxism isn't about having a wrong plan for how society should be run. Everybody's got one of those! The problem is being wrong about how social change happens in the first place.

It and all its offshoots and derivatives and variations all spin the same narrative, the one Marx predicted was going to happen due to magical historical inevitability. First, an intellectual class figures out how to order and govern a society and writes a manifesto. Then, the working class and/or other oppressed underclass spontaneously rises up and eliminates the old oppressive regime. Then, they dutifully hand power over to the intellectuals to put their superior plan into effect.

I can't stand when people make up stuff while pretending that they are talking about reality.
What did Marx predict "was going to happen due to magical historical inevitability"? Link and quotation, please, not more fabulation.

In the real world, the working class is not fond of ideologies. They mostly want the government and middle management off their backs. They want a day's pay for a day's work, and they want to take it home, not just glimpse at it on a stub before it's deducted for the greater good. They want any cutting in line to be consensual and justified by pragmatic needs, not by abstract principles thrust upon them as non-negotiable. They want meetings at work to be about work, not self-criticizing their microaggressions or receiving advice on coping with stress from the same people causing the stress.

In the real world, the working classes love nothing more than ideologies, unfortunately. Just take a look at the mass media and entertainment they consume.

Your idea of the working class is obviously fabricated in your own image: 'The working class is opposed to paying taxes, they are against DEI, and thus they also don't want to be criticized for sexual harassment or racism at the work place.' It's the MAGA ideal of what constitutes the way of thinking of the working classes. It is conspicuous when I compare your fantasy workers with workers in my country. They don't really mind seeing taxes being "deducted for the greater good" as long as that is actually the purpose for which those taxes are being deducted: not least free education and universal health care. And they are usually so well informed about things "in the real world" that they know that a lower rate of taxation doesn't make up for having to pay for health care, for education and having to accept wages that make it necessary to rely on food stamps to get by.

Even in the USA, Bernie Sanders seems to be able to present this comparison in a way that ordinary workers understand - in spite of their consummation of far too much Fox News and Hallmark Channel movies.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Counterpoint: There are very few competent elevator installation and maintenance companies in Portland. Fewer companies than there is demand for their services. You'd think that this would create an opportunity for a competitor to enter the market, but apparently this isn't the case. The barriers to entry must be pretty daunting.

Anyway, our building has two elevators. Historically, they have been serviced by Thyssen-Krupp Elevators, one of the top service providers in the city. But their customer service sucks, and their contracts are written to favor them at the expense of their customers. Still, there's only two other companies in town, and neither of them are really up to the task of servicing our elevators. So, we hired a former TKE employee to act as a broker/advisor. He helped us negotiate a better contract, just in time for our major elevator upgrade project.

So now we're contracted with TKE to upgrade both our elevators. And the project has been delayed several times because of other commitments they have with other customers in town, who are also desperate for one of the three overbooked service providers to fit them in. So sometimes, no, it isn't two different people in two different trucks with two different tool boxes. Sometimes it's one provider, and they get to pick and choose which customers get serviced when.

All of that is true... but you're talking about literally the same company having to allocate time among competing projects. It in no way counters my point that Alex buying a plan somehow prevents Sam from buying a car.