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I know that maybe is a bit OT here, but I cannot wrap my head, after seeing communists argue on /r/wikipedia (that, as the wiki itself, is full of radical leftists arguing inside) about communism.
When I think how Marxism was gladly embraced by èlites in the West, and, after the fall of the URSS, the more anglocentric progressive one that took his side, it makes me think about the type of people that embrace it.
As Zagrebbi argue here https://salafisommelier.substack.com/p/a-robin-hanson-perspective-on-the Marxism is really the Platonic Realm of wordcellery!
All arguments, apart from being factually false, are reduced not on "policy" or "government", but on words, and how to define words, how to use words in a different manner, how words can be used in different ways, how different ideologies are different because "words" says so. A typical argument goes like this: "Communism is good because, unlike Fascism or whatever else, has a good objective. The objective is good because Communism say so. Different types of Communism are born from different interpretation of Communism, who are not all good (choose here if we are talking about Stalin, Social Democracy, Left Liberalism, Anarchism, Maoism etc) because they did not adhere to the ideal definition of Communism, and everyone who does not produce a good result has secretly bad objectives or it was a Fascist all along"
Obviously I am paraphrasing an hypotetical argument of an hypotetical communist, so I am really fighting against a non-entity here. But I saw enough debates that I could crystallise it in few phrases, and understand that the marxist galaxy today has been reduced to discussions about hypoteticals and fandoms, as if it was Fanfiction.net or Archive of Our Own. Gone are the immense volumes of marxist economy or revolutionary action, in autistic dissertation on good end evil. Or maybe not, and I do not have enough knowledge of historical marxist politics, maybe they were like this all along, but I refuse to believe that communists won for decades using this kind of reasoning.
It is not surprising why Wokism had an evolutionary advantage on post-URSS marxism. All of this autism is pretty ick, it works on Reddit but not on real life, because every normal person can smell with a bullshit detector that this lines are actively trying to scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach. Wokism is better as an ideology because it refuses, partially, to play words. Patriarchy and Europeans are not evil because machiavellian people have tried to derail the progressive project, and our objective is to clean it arguing that, no, whoever did something bad was actively trying to sabotage the Real Meaning of Patriarchy. No, they are evil because of biology/social constructs and they deserve suffering. Autistic screeching and wordcelism do not play well with modern political coalition and the Schmittian Friend/Enemy distinction, and they also makes the women have the ick and the supporters smells like Redditors!
This is just a baffling description of wokism. Wokism is all about political correctness, language policing, definitional games, etc. Changing the definition of 'racism' 'woman' etc.
Half the reason TheMotte is here is that Scott went viral a decade ago discussing Social Justice And Words, Words, Words.
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TIL. I find that there is something deeply ironic about a subreddit on Wikipedia. Like if I learned that Linux devs had weekly meetings on Microsoft Teams.
Only that I see only a single post which is meta ("how do I appeal a ban?"), while most other posts are simply "look at this cool WP article I found", so it is more like a bunch of Ubuntu users having a weekly Teams meeting.
I wish you would not do that. "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument." If we allow that kind of metaphor, we will also get "he went after her as fast as a Catholic priest would go after the altar boy" or "as stupid as a green card Trump supporter".
I agree that communism might seem to be defined circularly, and at times might be, but the same can be said of of the Christian claim that god is good.
Nor is it likely that any moral philosophy will fare much better. Personally, I am an utilitarian, but if someone goes "On a rather fundamental level, all matter seems to be made out of a few fundamental particles. Why should one configuration of these particles be better or worse than another one? You speak of utils, but so far these are so hypothetical that they make phonons look like real particles by comparison. Do you propose that we build an orphan collider to try to produce a few non-virtual utils, like we did with the Higgs?" then it is very unlikely that I will find an argument to convince them.
Of course, since the early 1900s communism has a bit of a "No True Scotsman" problem on top of that.
You claim that this circular reasoning something related to being on the autism spectrum? Do you have any citation for that? Or is posting on a text-enabled website like reddit instead of tiktok sufficient proof of autism these days? Did the APA update the DSM-5 again?
I think that with the fall of the USSR, most orthodox commies went the way of the dodo, mostly. In 1970 in Europe, you could definitely get laid if you signaled knowledge and support of communism. The texts people wrote about it were probably longer than what you would find on reddit, but I do not see how this is an argument that commies were less autistic. Today, Stephenie Meyer is probably inspiring more tokens of fanfiction per day than the work of Karl Marx.
I think that besides the fact that unlike Twillight, the dictatorship of the poletariat has been tried and found wanting, another reason is that the principal victim class for which communism claims to speak are no longer very sympathetic. In the times of Marx and Luxemburg, all you had to do to convince your friends of the worthiness of the cause was to take a stroll through the working class quarters.
But capitalism had mostly solved these extremely unpleasant side effects of the industrial revolution, at least in the first world. A member of the working class who has a TV set and uses it to watch Fox News is no longer someone who a saloon communist could mistake as a victim of capitalist oppression.
So the leftist middle class needed a new victim for whom they could claim to fight. Women. Ethnic and sexual minorities (except pedos, because everyone hates pedos). Victims of colonization. Of course, unlike Marx, they have much less of a master plan, a grand strategy, a theory of victory.
If affirmative action leads to equal outcomes, then historical wrong has been righted. If it does not lead to equal outcomes, then the historical wrong is even larger than previously thought and we need to put our hand on the scales even more.
But they are also much totally compatible with capitalism. Companies can cheaply signal their guilt and repentance by doing a few land acknowledgements, participating in pride month and hiring a few DEI candidates.
For the record, I think that they are less convincing an ideology than communism. In 1900, a communist could have appealed to my utilitarianism, pointed to the misery of the working class and convinced me that Marx's plan was better than ending up in a world where 1% own most of the stuff. By contrast, it seems pretty clear to me that from a utilitarian point of view, the optimal answer to racial discrimination is color blindness. And contrary to SJ, I still care about the overall distribution of wealth (because the utility a person can get out of it is roughly logarithmic, so one billionaire and 999 people without savings seems worse than 1000 millionaires). I mean, history shows that "murder all the rich people and take their stuff" goes extremely poorly, but I am convinced that we could raise the maximum income tax without stepping onto a slippery slope which ends with gulags.
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I’m really tempted to argue against your points on the merits, but I think it’s more important to talk about the rules. Particularly this one.
If you have to make up an imaginary hypothetical paraphrase for someone, that should be a warning sign. It should make you wonder if you’re getting things quite right. It’s certainly not a good reason to pivot into general-purpose bashing session.
This post looks a lot more like waging the culture war than understanding it.
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This seems backwards. Do you think communism just popped into existence one day, fully formed and respectable, and brainwashed the masses into thinking that their goals are good because they say so? The fundamental ethos of communism, that it is unfair for the better-born to cash in on their innate superiority (and all the more so on compound interest from the superiority of their parents), evidently resonates with many across time and place - the ancient Christians, who steamrolled over the strength-is-beauty-is-justice pagan ethos of Rome, did not need mustache-twirling wordcels in high places berating anyone on their behalf to gain followers, nor did the French Revolution with its cries for égalité.
I fully understand how cosmically unfair it seems to rightists that Hitler and Stalin can kill masses of people on the same order of magnitude but only the latter gets a pass because supposedly his end goal is the virtuous one (and you can't at all relate to this assessment of it, leading you to conclude that it must be a wordcel conspiracy), but to that I can only respond, git gud. You are supposed to be the ones who celebrate natural excellence and letting the superior prevail; why do you then kvetch when your value system loses in the marketplace of ideas? You are not going to win with an argument to the effect of "wordcels are too good with words, it is unfair that they get to push communism and win" when you are trying to argue against the very premise of your own argument.
You don't think the Church Fathers were wordcels? You don't think Rousseau and Voltaire were wordcels? Revolution has always been a wordcel endeavour, for better or for worse, until it reaches the point where you need shape rotators to handle the finances and military logistics.
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Ha, this reminds me of the most recent Jubilee video where Mehdi Hasan "debated" "20 Far-Right Conservatives". The kid at 22:10 has apparently been fired for proclaiming himself a fascist. I bet he wishes he was a Stalinist now!
Sure, "git gud", but the Nazis have a permanent debuff in the form of the post-WWII liberal order. The aspiring Nazi can't just go on Jubilee and plead his case in economic terms like the communist; they're saddled with rationalizing racism, deporting non-whites, anti-semitism. They have to actually sit down in front of Mehdi Hasan and tell him to his face, "You're not American (or English, whatever) and you will never be. Our countries should violently expel the third worlders and we're gonna start with you, Mr. Hasan".
On net, Jubilee is probably doing society a favor by exposing Twitter anons to the wider population. When confronted, they sputter, awkwardly fidget like Connor Estelle, and most everyone watching dismisses them. Though in fairness, the online racist community almost certainly has better representatives than these folx.
Oh man. Vatican II makes a lot more sense now. Every Catholic Church in America would get Waco'd if they openly churned out integralists like this regularly.
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I'm going to take issue with both examples here, both nascent Christianity and especially the French Revolution had wordy intellectuals at the hearts of their movements. Robespierre wasn't just selling like, vibes man.
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I am not exactly sure how Stalin "gets a pass". If you asked people to list the most evil leaders in world history, there's a high chance that they'd list Hitler first and Stalin second.
One could say that Stalin "got a pass" in the way that he probably died from natural causes (unless one believes that he was poisoned) while Hitler desperately committed suicide, but that's because Stalin won a war and Hitler lost one, not due to the perceived virtue of their causes in the eyes of others.
I think that while Stalin is rightfully reviled, Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness. Whenever we (as a culture) want to drive home the fact that something (e.g. abortion, factory farming, enforced political correctness) is maximally evil, the metaphors we reach fore are not "Stalin", "KGB", "political commissar" and "Holodomor" (a word which chromium does not even recognize), but "Hitler", "SS", "Gestapo" and "holocaust".
To be fair, the Nazis worked really tirelessly to earn the top spot on the evil assholes list. At the end, I do not think that popular culture dispassionately decided that Stalin might have killed more people, but Hitler managed a higher rate and should thus get the first prize. It was probably more that Hitler went to war with most of the Western world, so there was already a rather strong sentiment against him by the time the magnitude of his evil became common knowledge. "Turns out that the guy against whom we have been fighting one of the most bloody wars in history and who has been painted as a villain by our propaganda was actually also murdering people at a rate of a few trains a day, so if anything our propaganda painted him too flattering."
By contrast, Stalin died in 53, way before peak cold war. Subsequent propaganda focused on the USSR in general, not their dead worst leader ever. And of course there were plenty of sympathizers to downplay his atrocities.
There's too much overthinking in this thread.
Nazism is reviled because of the inherent implications for multiracial, multicultural societies. The main thrust of Nazism and Hitler - the enactment of an ethnonationalist society through violence on a country-wide scale - is incompatible in a nation where "less than half of US children under 15 are white".
Communism has an offramp because it's in principal an economic ideology.
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It's totally normal for people to describe shit they think as evil as 'kgb', though. You're correct that people call their political opponents Hitler more than Stalin, but there's always been a token of axiomatic evil in figurative speech- it used to be the biblical pharoah(like from Exodus). Hitler's portrayal during WWII was actually rather buffoonish more than outright evil; the Japs on the other hand...
Now why Hitler gets the title rather than Tojo, that might just be the dominance of Jews in Hollywood. I can remember old folks using terms like 'banzai' to refer to crazy evil, but that was more specific to the crazy part. I can definitely remember, quite recently and by younger people, Stalin used as a metaphor for totalitarian evil. But Hitler definitely takes the generic spot.
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I think they were both pretty equal in evil. The reason that Stalin gets a pass is that it makes an absolute mess of the moral certainty that the postwar order created. We were allies with Russia, and im not sure that the Allies would have won without Stalin and his war machine. If the war had remained a one front war, it’s possible that some form of Nazi German Empire would have survived. It was only because Russia was involved that we won, and thus talking about Holodomor and Gulag systems (which were absolutely as evil as any of the German labor camps) becomes a bit of a hagiographic problem. Stalin being known to be equally as ruthless would turn the story sideways. Which is a problem because the postwar mythological narrative of Liberal Western Globalist order is “we defeated the worst thing that had ever existed. Thus we have the moral right to rule over everything.” And furthermore it gives the new order a moral certainty— evil looks like Hitler, evil looks like straight armed salutes, arm bands, and speeches in big stadiums and big red flags.
Now they were obviously both evil and killed millions and committed genocide of people into the millions of people. But I don’t think the way the mythology works in th3 modern world works for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it turned things that used to be considered okay into evil simply because they’d been used to evil ends. Nationalism and patriotism are usually good things, they hold people together to build a country. It works in China. They think being Chinese is good and favor things that benefit China.
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This is an interesting phrase; it's accurate at the surface level, and also revealing in its accuracy upon scrutiny. It is more than evident that Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness.
Cultural.
...Personally, I simply note that, by my standards, many and perhaps most people fail this particular test of humanity, and downgrade my understanding of humans and human society accordingly. The way leftists talk about fascists and fascism is, to me, a reasonably accurate working hypothesis of what most of you out there, the population in general, are really like. Maybe you can be reasoned with, or coerced. Maybe you need to have fire dropped on your cities in industrial quantities. Time will tell, and we all have it coming in the end.
I have no reason to disbelieve that the sections you've quoted from the Red Terror entry on Wikipedia actually happened. In fact, I'm inclined to believe all of it.
However, I do have to say that some of it - (1) the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails, (2) Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape, (3) the Cheka in Kislovodsk, "for lack of a better idea", killed all the patients in the hospital - reads like the more fantastical and debunked stories of the Holocaust that deniers always trot out to muddy the waters.
I don't want to dwell too much on this topic, but could it be that these more horrific types of tortures were limited to just a handful of people and the rest were summarily executed?
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Maybe I'm tired and not understanding correctly, but your use of the collective 'you' is reading to me as linking to both the perpetrator and victim of firebombing alike- or possibly both, as in someone deserving firebombing.
Might I ask you to reword this for clarity?
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Look at the education system. "In high school, you get 155 hours on Hitler, 3 minutes on Stalin, and nothing on Pol Pot. Nothing on Mao. Barely a mention of Fidel Castro."
Look at the cinema industry. A million movies about the holocaust, one film about the Holodomor.
Ask random normies about Hitler, and they will tell you that he was evil because he tried to exterminate the Jews. Ask random normies about Stalin, and chances are they won't even know who he was.
Yougov: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Worst_World_Leaders_poll_results.pdf
68% have an unfavorable view of Stalin, with only 26% undecided (a subset of which presumably have not heard of him).
Edit: stefferi beat me to it.
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My public K-12 education had 0 hours on Hitler. It had no WW2 history at all. We went over Japanese internment quite a bit. But somehow not the theaters of war or Hitler. Which seems like an obvious gap.
I remember WWII history, but far less of it than Holocaust.
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Come on, man. Just give this claim a basic sanity check. An American high schooler will have an hour of history a day and about 180 school days per year. This claim would indicate they spend most of a school year's worth just on Hitler. This isn't happening. They're not spending that much time on WW2 as a whole, let alone just Hitler.
Especially since according to woke we also have to spend inordinate amounts of time on slavery and the wrongs done to minorities and other minorities. There isn't enough time for that and 155 hours of Hitler.
We did spend a lot of time on Hitler relatively speaking, but I also remember reading animal farm in history class and spending almost equally large amounts of time on the evils of communism.
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Idk, I got a day long lecture on Stalin twice and Mao once. Admittedly multiple monthlong units on the Holocaust make it add up to a similar fraction.
I also would expect random normies to know who Stalin was, and if poorly educated default to describing him as ‘Russian Hitler’ or similar.
Yeah, I would be astonished if random normies didn't know who Stalin was. That's not even being highly educated, that's "did you graduate high school" material.
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While I am undoubtedly living in a country prone to see Stalin as particularly unfavorably (though I doubt the scientific factor of the quotes above), this prompted me to go find an actual poll on the topic. In a YouGov poll of 1000+ Americans, 68% view him as somewhat or very unfavorably (58% very unfavorably), 6 % as somewhat or very favorably, and 26% don't know. So, while there's a contigent who don't know him, "asking random normies about Stalin" does clearly show they do know who he is and view him (very) unfavorably.
Hitler unsurprisingly is better known and even less favored, and there are some other world leaders who surpass Stalin (Kim Jong-Un and Saddam Hussein), but interestingly Hitler isn't even the least favored of the figures asked - Osama bin Laden is.
There has also of course been a push for more remiscining on the evils of Stalin around the West in the recent years due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine leading to new visibility for Holodomor and comparisons of Putin to Stalin etc.
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I can't speak to that posters experience but my high school world history classes (late 00's-early 10's) definitely covered Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Castro.
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A little offtopic, but has there been much discussion about why Marx's theory is called Materialist-Dialectic or whatever? The word "Dialectic" is almost exclusively used by (my) outgroup so I don't care much about what it means specifically -- much of its use is probably shibboleth. Why the word "Materialist?" That Marxists do not believe in God seems unimportant to me. You might as well call wokeness Materialist, or the Nurture Hypothesis also Materialist. Is it too uncharitable if my first instinct is that it is the same phenomenon as postmodern writing appropriating physics terms? That is, using the term "Materialist" makes Marxism sound descriptive and scientific? This wouldn't surprise me, especially since my read of the discussion here is that LTV seems obviously like a moral prescription.
Slightly more on-topic, I think Zagrebbi is more correct than Cofnas. We actually went over this a few weeks ago. The deleted comment in this thread originally linked to here. Perhaps the equality thesis has not been falsified already. But if it ever were, I fully expect those facts to be memory-holed.
I guess that means we should expect the actual undoing (if it should ever happen) of woke will be mocking it and making it low status (somehow? This is left as an exercise to the reader).
The word "dialectic" has had multiple incompatible definitions throughout the history of philosophy. When Marxists use the term, they're using it in the sense that Hegel used it, which is... well, you could argue that even Hegel and his followers didn't have one consistent definition of the term. But I think you can reasonably say that all usages of the (Hegelian) term "dialectical" revolve around the idea of an "immanent internal critique of a concept or position via the concept's internal contradictions". Many common arguments against naive libertarianism could be classified as dialectical (in the Hegelian sense). If you tell the libertarian that libertarianism is bad because freedom is bad, that's an external critique. But many people accept libertarianism's presupposition that freedom is good; they just think that libertarianism fails to live up to its own ideals, that the particular kind of formal freedom offered by libertarianism fails to secure certain actual freedoms that we value. Freedom can in fact give rise to its own opposite, unfreedom (an isolated individual in a pure state of nature is "free", but he's also rather unfree, since the physical world immediately begins to make strenuous demands on him). That's an internal, dialectical critique.
Marxists have a dialectical view of history because they think that the internal (and material, according to them) contradictions of a given mode of production are what give rise to social and historical change.
"Materialism" has two distinct meanings in philosophy. There's materialism as a metaphysical thesis, which is the thesis that everything that exists is material (this is the "God doesn't exist" version), and there's materialism as a sociological thesis, which is the thesis that material conditions are the driving force of social and historical change (as opposed to "sociological" idealism - the thesis that people inventing and adopting new ideas is what drives historical change). In contemporary analytic philosophy, you basically only see materialism/idealism used as metaphysical terms, while in continental philosophy (the tradition that Marx and Marxists belong to), people will freely switch between both usages. The type of materialism that Marxists place the emphasis on is really more of the sociological kind (although they're almost universally metaphysical materialists as well).
See this for an overview of the debate between Marx's sociological materialism and Hegel's sociological idealism.
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Matt Walsh making Robin DiAngelo pay $30 to his black camera man was effective in that even mainstream media talked about the scene and she vanished in shame:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9JSjAnGwzqI
But mocking is difficult, as the superweapon of political correctness was to make mocking cringe, one can’t make deriding jokes of gay/fat/trans/ChingChong/disabled/mentalIllness/unhoused/otherness when it is punching down. Sort of a jiujitsu move: being gay was low status and destroyed careers until coming-out got the quality of braveness. This can be easily transferred to other former icks.
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Marx called his dialectic "materialist" to differentiate it from the Hegelian dialectic that was its philosophical ancestor, and was fundamentally idealist in nature. "Dialectic" in this sense refers to a specific notion of an idea (or material condition) being confronted by its negation and the contradiction between the two being resolved in some further form. For Hegel this generally took the form of some initial idea (thesis) being confronted by its negation (antithesis) and the contradiction between the two being resolved in some further idea (synthesis). Marx intends to ground this process in material conditions (in social classes, or labor relations, or similar sorts of things) rather than in ideas so it is "materialist" in contrast to Hegel's idealism. It doesn't really have anything to do with God or the use of "materialist" in other philosophical contexts.
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Because back in the 1850s there were a lot of non-materialist philosophies so it was actually a meaningful distinction.
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That little link has 6236 words and a hundred links! The post makes one interesting (novel?) idea in positioning itself against Hanania and others: Wokists are not woke because they believe in equality, but they believe in equality so that they can signal wokism (to differentiate themselves as elite from the non-elite underclass). Wokism is more viral than Marxism, because the latter was born in a homogeneous society while Wokism evolved in the multi-ethnic world we are living today and is used in credibly giving a pro-social signal to minority-elitists. Wokism is a tool in the status hierarchy. That also means we have not reached peak wokeness, as the tool will remain useful in future.
As a side note: some Russian nationalists bemoan that USSR-Marxism developed wokist elements (promoting the minority out-group). For example Ukraine getting Crimea under Khrushchev instead of Russification like under the Zars.
Tzars*
I haven't heard any Russian nationalists say that.
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I am not a scholar of Marxist thought by any means but I come across it often enough as a leftist more generally. My impression is that what Marxists of all kinds agree with, and find value in, is Marx's critique of capitalism and his particular methods (dialectical materialism) for doing so. Where they often diverge is how we will get from our present system to a communist (moneyless, classless, stateless) one. Each of these different branches thinks of themselves as "real" communists in a way the others aren't. You also get the "communism has never been tried" discussions because there have always been (and likely will always be) deviations from an ideal theoretical implementation when actually implementing them, which allows those adherents to continue believing that the correct outcomes would be achieved if only they had been closer to theory (this is not unique to Marxism).
As to wokism's advantage, I think it is simpler. To the extent wokism encompasses things like non-discrimination laws it fits firmly in the liberal (in the political philosophy sense) tradition that American elites have always considered themselves inspired by. Certainly in a way that the more common varieties of communism (like Marxism-Leninism) do not.
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I gave up on Marxism as a 'serious' ideology (maybe such a thing is already an oxymoron) long ago when I learned that they've failed to resolve the Economic Calculation Problem even though it was introduced 100 years ago. Even though it kept rearing its heads every time they actually got their way and were able to implement the system.
The trajectory of Venezuela and (recently) Argentina alone should make someone skeptical of their ideals!
You can redefine 'efficiency,' you can try to redefine people's desires or propose that as long as things are more 'fair' (as defined by you) it doesn't matter if people's desires are fully sated...
But end of the day if your economy is not producing as much of [desirable things] as efficiently as a comparable economy using a different system, you are losing the argument.
Even more telling that even the partial solutions require re-introduce market mechanisms, and thus private property and trade.
But rather than take this critique (and the various real-world experiments that have occurred) seriously and throwing their efforts into truly solving it or at least trying solutions at smaller scales... they just plow on ahead trying to remake various economies into their preferred system and damn the predictable consequences.
Someone I read recently (might have been here?) pointed out that almost all notable lefties these days aren't even trying to pretend there's any place where socialism works and people are thriving, or that Marxism has viable answers... its literally just power politics at this point, leverage grievances, make exorbitant promises, and lie through your teeth to get to a position where, ironically, you can leech massive amounts of wealth off the Capitalist system, and deliver some of that to your supporters as reward. The more earnest ones might still try to claim they're opposing fascism but its almost impossible to believe that they don't know how their proposed system has failed to achieve its goals everywhere it has been tried (this is the part where someone says "ALWAYS HAS BEEN").
At this point I am genuinely in favor of a permanent exchange/exile program where avowed communists/marxists over the age of, say, 25 can be sent to any given country of their choice that will take them, and we will accept one citizen from said country that can correctly answer some economics 101 questions.
On the other hand, if there's any "moderate" Marxists who dislike Capitalism but aren't actively trying to dismantle it, I'd also be willing to put them into a policy thinktank where they can propose methods of possibly addressing the worst excesses of Capitalist society (measured in a quantifiable way and compared to a meaningful alternative/baseline!) and work on making Capitalism better. I don't want to remove all ideological competition to Capitalism, that would be hypocritical, and our own theory says competition helps improve most things. But these Marxists would have to understand that the very instant they're caught doing any of that activist shit, I, personally, will be loading them on the one-way flight to North Korea.
I feel like your last point is basically the social safety net and pro-union wing of the left (and now right?). In that respect we already do have a lot of pushback against pure capitalism in a practical sense, and a lot of it came from socialist strains.
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But Marxists don't care about winning or losing "the argument". What they want to do is change the rules by which the argument itself is conducted. They want a wholesale reevaluation of what it means to "win" or "lose" "the argument" in the first place.
If your politics is based on "whoever is producing the most goods most efficiently is the winner", then Marxists would consider that to be, to use one of Zizek's favorite phrases, "pure ideology". That belief is an ideological effect of capitalism itself. It's not a natural or obvious conclusion. You could conceivably hold a different belief instead.
This is not to say that Marxists must necessarily adhere to a degrowth ideology of course. Rather they would say that, whatever historical epoch comes after capitalism, the way in which inhabitants of that epoch think about concepts like "production" and "efficiency" will be as incomprehensible to us as the capitalism vs Marxism debate is to hunter-gatherers. Marxism at its core is a theory of history, and how contradictions in social relations drive historical change (e.g. the contradiction between the formal freedom of neoliberal free trade, and the fact that this formal freedom can paradoxically result in less actual freedom as globalized hypercompetition forces homogenization). Your historical epoch plays a role in shaping what counts as a "winning" or "losing" argument to you, what counts as a "reasonable" political aim, etc.
Sure.
But for being so big on "Material Conditions," they should notice that if material conditions are more favorable in the other system, that's going to supercede their clever wordplay.
If we're talking about a "satisfying human desires" contest, that seems pretty fair.
I think even the Hunter-Gatherers were playing that game, and could probably grasp that a tribe that was bringing home more meat and berries and could use its surpluses to make things like fur coats and better tools and weapons were 'winning' in some meaningful way.
Capitalism's great "insight" was that you didn't have to go over and raid and pillage the neighboring tribe to benefit from their bounty. Instead you can identify things you have, that they want, and trade such things for mutual gain, then use those gains to bolster your productive capacity again. At some point someone invents 'money' and its off to the races.
Not sure what Marxism's great "insight" was, or at least what insight they have that improved people's lives since it was implemented.
They want to CLAIM things like "the five day work week" or "liberation of slaves" or "unionization/collective bargaining," but I think even their own theories support the materialist interpretation that such things only ever came about because Capitalism made us productive enough to spare more resources for leisure and alleviation of suffering, and to give workers the leverage to demand better compensation for their labor.
But human desires are malleable. They are not static across history. That's the point.
A century ago, not wanting to have kids was seen as much more eccentric than it is today. Now there's a whole "childfree" movement and the birthrate is dropping precipitously. Biology didn't change that fast. A change in material and social conditions caused a change in desires. So before you say "well this is the best way to satisfy human desires", you have to ask whose human desires.
Of course almost everyone is going to want to be assured of their basic survival and security. That one is pretty hard to get around. But even then! There have been plenty of people who chose to live an ascetic life and managed with very little.
I mean, were they? What is "winning"? Is the winner the one with the most weapons, or are the weapons just a means to some other win condition?
Are you using the system of production as a means to your own ends, or is the system of production using you as a means to reproduce itself? (Marxists of course think that under capitalism, it's the latter.)
This is not how Marxists use the term "capitalism". Not the intelligent ones anyway.
The sophisticated Marxists recognize that there's no single identifying feature that separates capitalism from other "economic systems" in previous historical epochs. Money, trade, wage labor, private property, and even financial speculation have existed essentially since the beginning of human civilization (I believe Max Weber talks about this in the preface to The Protestant Work Ethic). "Capitalism" for Marxists essentially means "industrialization", or perhaps more specifically, "the contradictions in liberal humanist social relations engendered by industrialization".
Yes, that is literally just the orthodox Marxist position.
Capitalism is not an aberration or a mistake. It's a necessary phase of development; albeit one that contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is in fact the only thing that can give us the tools to go beyond itself. It is always and only the master's tools that dismantle the master's house (if you believe Hegel).
Natural biology didn't change that fast. Chemicals that changed people's biological makeup in subtle but drastic ways probably did, I'd wager. Lot of social changes downstream of that, though, which of course we've discussed.
If the Marxist critique was more limited to "Capitalism generates feedback loops that can spin off and have 'unexpected' effects that harm more people than they benefit in the medium term" I'd not push back hardly at all.
But we've had a theoretical solution to that issue for decades. Marxism didn't generate that solution.
The weapons can make them more efficient hunters (or maybe the weapons are more durable and so can be used more than once) so as to increase their surplus, in this case.
Which can either free up the time and labor of some of the guys who would have been hunting to work on other things, or allow them to store up more meat for lean times like winter, and if they make good use of that surplus they'll be positioned to be even more productive on the other side of it. I think Irwin Schiff's How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesn't gets this right in the particulars.
I don't necessarily think there is any 'final win condition,' mind, at least not in an entropy-increasing universe, just the process of ensuring continued improvement as long as possible and, ideally, the continuation of your genetic line.
Well, I don't believe Hegel.
Again, I don't see this as an 'insight' of Marxism. Capitalism is a 'necessary' stage of development if humans want their desires to continue being fulfilled.
Capitalism (even if we limited it to your preferred "industrialization and its consequences" definition) continues to adapt to fulfill a greater array of human desires using the tools of 'free' trade, development of ever greater capital stock, and innovation towards more efficient use of resources. It isn't necessarily building 'towards' something or to any other new phase of existence unless, I suppose, we somehow manage to actually satisfy every human desire to the point of full contentment.
To my personal dismay, it turns out that people's desires tend to skew towards seeking pleasure and raising their own status (which makes sense, when you consider our evolutionary history) over trying to elevate the species as a whole towards controling more energy and resources than those found in the crust of our little spinny space rock.
But then Capitalism also permits the existence of Billionaires who use their surpluses to fund their own preferences, including creating really massive rockets which can be used to bootstrap further industry in outer space.
(which yes, goes towards the whole "people's desires change." If affordable flights to Mars ever become available, there's probably a lot who would take those, even if it barely crosses their mind right now).
Marxists get REALLLLLLY mad about this for some reason, that we might get "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism"... without the Communism.
I don't see any good argument from Marxists for:
A) Why we ought to go beyond Capitalism (Hume's Guillotine notwithstanding, even!). Its working well, if we assume "fulfilling human desires" is the game and is a worthy goal;
B) How Socialism/Communism is going to replace it when its a fundamentally broken system that can't coordinate human society beyond the tribal level.
Its a seeming dead end in both those respects. It can't fulfill the role they predict for it, and there's no cognizable moral imperative to try and make it fulfill the role.
So what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
I'm still a bit unclear on whether you think increasingly efficient production is a good in and of itself, or if you think it's only good insofar as it can be a means to other ends.
What kinds of other things?
What if we could hypothetically assume an eternal universe? What then?
Well, there are multiple ways to read that.
If we start talking like "the best man is the one who sires the most children", then all we've done is smuggle the same language of marketplace efficiency into a new domain.
I used to, but I do not anymore. Increasing efficiency is still pretty close to a primary goal, though.
However its a prerequisite to many, MANY good things. Some of those things result in less efficient use of resources, however (broadly speaking, leisure/leisure activities).
Have they invented the wheel yet? If so, lot of things they can work on with wheel tech available.
If not, it slightly increases the odds of someone stumbling upon that invention.
That's closer to my conception (contra Hegel et. al) of how society ends up improving changing.
From my perspective, seems obvious: develop tech as close to immortality as you can, then go travel around to see all you can see that's out there. Unless we can mathematically prove that we'll eventually saturate our desire for 'fun' and novelty, and we can't augment those desires, seems like one can make good use of eternity tooling around the galaxies looking for cool stuff.
I kind of use it in the broad sense of "there exist some people who can trace their genetic background to you (and beyond) and thus will acknowledge your existence long after you're gone."
Add in some sci-fi, and it becomes "you have descendants who might be interested enough in stuff that happened in your lifetime to run a simulation of you, assuming they can't resurrect you directly."
I dunno, I'm not trying to impose my terminal values on everyone else. To the extent people have different terminal values, increasing the amount of energy and resources available to people, and increase the efficiency with which we use them means more people can chase their preferred terminal values without stepping on each other's toes/inciting conflicts.
As I asked, what use does Marxism have on offer for any rational human being, other than perhaps allowing incisive critiques of the flaws in a Capitalist system which we can then try to address and fix within said system?
All the stuff I'm suggesting up there are achievable within Capitalism.
Pretty close? Is there anything closer?
You may have an answer, or you may not. It's fine to say you're not sure.
Wouldn't this just be the sort of pursuit of pleasure/leisure that you've been criticizing? Or do you not see it that way?
I'm much more interested in the way you think about value than the way you think about Marxism.
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Have to agree with this. Marx's central argument is that focusing on pure production is confusing use-value for monetary value. Capitalist focus on production above all else results in commodity fetishism and the misallocation of labor and resources to goods that don't provide much use value to members of society.
One can argue 'monetary value is not use-value'. Sure. But name a better predictor.
In practice, prices are literally--like quite literally and exclusively--the result of billions of people voting with their dollars, based on how much utility they believe item x has. What could be a better predictor average of use-value than every persons' opinions on use-value, averaged out?
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A lot of people love to criticize Marx without actually having read him. You and this sub-stacker included. Where does Marx ever support wokeness in his writings? Capital was a critique of capitalism and the social systems that it encourages that is largely correct. I have yet to hear an actually convincing critique of commodity fetishism or the labour theory of value that isn't a nitpick. Western leftists don't actually want to read Marx (because he is hard), nor do they seriously want to implement his ideas (also hard, and never successfully done, you can complain all you want about me pulling out the "not real communism" card, but the Soviet Union and China very clearly still engaged in capitalistic commodity production, which Marx would have criticized).
90 percent of the people on the Motte got their entire knowledge of communism from one PragerU video they watched 10 years ago.
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Its not that Marx neccesarily supported Wokeism so much as the Woke copied the Marxists' homework and flipped few of the words around in the hopes the teacher wouldn't notice. The identitarian left literally used to describe thier ideology as "Cultural Marxism" back in the 90s.
The analogy I would use is that they dug out the rotting corpse of communism from the graveyard cut of the head (caring about social inequity), and limbs (e.g. working towards a revolution), replaced the head and a few limbs with what had previously been sideshows on the left, and then sent comrade Igor to the roof with a lightning rod.
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A communist factory is having its workers toil away for hours making widgets that nobody wants. The value of those widgets is zero irregardless of how much work went into making them.
That's not exactly a nitpick. How much people want something is incredibly important in determining its value.
This is a straw man of the labor theory of value. And also equally applies to capitalist speculative bubbles. This is what Marx calls commodity fetishism: the divorcing of use value from monetary value.
Is there a way to quantify "use value"? If not, this seems to be a rhetorical trick. Why would I care about a notion of value that exists simply to win arguments about communism?
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Whether or not they will be exchanged for money or handed out for free, nobody wants those widgets. They are useless crap. They are worthless.
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That just shows that the marxian concept of "use value" isn't fully capturing what people find...useful...about the things they buy, because money is entirely fungible into other "useful" items, and insofar as people are willing to spend it on one thing, they're revealing their utility function about both that thing and the other things they could have bought but aren't.
Money is entirely fungible -- that is, one unit of currency is the same as another unit of the same currency -- but it is not entirely convertible into other useful items (although it's pretty good at this). The divorcing of use value from exchange value doesn't make sense for commodities or bulk manufactured goods, but it does for other things -- real estate in particular.
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This again assumes humans are rational actors, and fails to adequately capture the reasons for an economic booms and busts in a capitalist system and the kind of behavior you see from the ultra-rich.
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More to the point, sometimes you can't even determine how much people will 'want' something until you take the risk of producing it and trying to sell it.
And sometimes you guess wrong, or you underestimate the ultimate demand and have to adjust.
That risk doesn't go away, its just a matter of who absorbs the risk of getting it wrong (or gets rewarded for getting it right!), and the existence of such a risk makes for one hell of an incentive to get it right.
Vs. the Soviet Commissary who is only punished if the widget factory doesn't produce enough widgets in a given month, even if those widgets are just being thrown out. So he'll happily keep the widgets flowing as long as he can.
That's not unique to communism, though: it's just the principal agent problem. Capitalist corporations regularly make decisions that are wildly insane due to non-economic factors and burn a lot of value in the process, and the decision maker can still walk away with their bag.
It's true that there is more of a signal to discourage this in capitalist economies, but that is a very coarse signal. And once a corporation becomes successful enough, it rapidly realizes that the best way to maintain its position is to do its best to eliminate the risks of being subject to that signal.
Well you're just getting at the point that skin in the game is the best way to align incentives.
If your company offers paying customers a ride to the Titanic on an experimental submersible, having your CEO along for each ride is a good way to align incentives.
And on that point, someone had to realize "hey, there might be a market for tours of the titanic wreck site," and actually spend money and develop a product that can deliver on that desire, while being uncertain if they'd find enough customers.
And if it fails, well that CEO is now removed from his position of influence.
I agree that there's been a drift where decision makers in a corporate environments are insulated from the consequences of their decisions (although I argue this is mostly due to political influence. Criminal prosecutions are underused).
I also agree with the point that dominant actors in a market will usually start attempting to reduce the influence of competition, to build their 'moat' so they can start to exploit their position rather than improve their practices.
I would not agree that they're successful in the majority of cases.
I'm just pointing out that in practice Communism is unadulterated diffusion of responsibility for any mistakes, and Capitalism at least HAS a signal, and there are ways to make the signal sharper.
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If Marxism does not work in practice, it doesn't matter how elegantly his theory is postulated: no more than we don't have to read Mein Kampf to present a convincing rebuttal of Nazism.
As for commodity fetishism and LTV, why do people want to buy Belle Delphine's gamer girl bathwater? Subjective theory of value (STV) is that it is not labor or the raw materials that determine the price of the good, but the people buying and selling. Can Marx explain the used panties market? The collectable card market? Not without extensive academic arm-twisting or moralistic dismissal.
Ah, but you don't understand. Nobody has yet tried True Marxism! /s
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Breathlessly awaiting someone to upload "The Marxist Explanation of the Labubu Phenomenon" to Youtube.
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If you were waiting for the right moment to add a flair, this is your moment.
Noted.
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The labour theory of value makes economically inaccurate predictions and was falsified as such before Capital was even published (Smith himself, who invented it, admitted it cannot account for short-term fluctuations in prices and offered alternatives). You can say a lot of good about Marx's sociological analysis, you can say no good about the LTV. It's just wrong. The only way you can say it's not wrong is by turning it into a moral dogma.
To quote Rothbard:
If we're to call this a nitpick, we're to call all of science a nitpick for discarding theories that make empirically false predictions.
The reason for the NEP is that Lenin tried Marxian economics and it so massively failed that they had to pragmatically adopt bourgeois economics.
The reason for Dengism is a similar pragmatic concession to the massive toll of Maoism.
Marxian ideas have been implemented, they simply did not produce the expected results. Collective farms do not output more food than centrally planned or privately owned alternatives all else being equal.
But both Maoism and the initial Soviet attempts to produce goods were commodity fetishism. Especially in Maoism there was this obsession with quantities of goods produced rather than with satisfying individual's use values. Even after NEP and in Dengism there were/are heavy amounts of commodity fetishism: focusing on raw quantities of goods produced rather than thinking about what the population actually needs
People love to dismiss the soviet system, and undoubtedly there were serious problems, but in some ways it was very impressive. The soviets took a country that was ravaged by civil war and by the after effects of WW1 that had never been fully industrialized and within 20 years managed to largely self-sufficiently outproduce the Nazis and win the Second World War. Yes lend-lease helped, but Soviet home industry did most of the heavy lifting.
After the war, it looked like things like linear algebra might help better calculate production quotas, but a combination of corruption, lack of compute power, and excessive focus on military spending made it impossible for the soviet standard of living to keep up with the West.
Can you explain the Rothbard quote a bit more? I feel like the easy explanation for that from within the LTV is that the labor equivalence ratios between different goods aren't calculated correctly. Although that kind of argument can quickly get into dogma territory, so maybe you're right.
That's dramatically underselling lend-lease. The US provided approximately 2/3 of the USSR's trucks, 60% of their aviation fuel, 10% of their planes, etc. And the US was also able to give all this to the Soviets while they also built the most powerful navy in human history and waged a war across North Africa, Europe, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia.
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I'd say American industry did most of the heavy lifting. The levels of American production were simply insane.
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