This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
Charitably, the great insight of economics that favor redistribution (more broad than Marxism/socialism) is that people who fall below a certain standard of living lose the ability to participate in the net-gain market, and so it's in everyone's favor to help them. Now, it's still under debate if the math works out, but I don't think it inherently doesn't work out! Or, you could say that leftist economics (the capitalist variant kind) had the realization that free markets develop monopolies too easily, so you need a certain level of intervention to stop it (e.g. Walmart using economies of scale to undercut a local supermarket for years on end, driving them out of business, only to raise prices once the competition lessens).
More options
Context Copy link
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).
Proceeding from the assumption that this is a prerequisite for human flourishing, I would like you to illustrate how a state governed by the principles of Marxism would be superior in securing "value" for people (however you define this) as opposed to capitalism. It's not difficult to radically question others' conceptions of value and attack their stated goals. Sowing philosophical doubt via endless Socratic questioning is easy, especially when it comes to a wishy-washy question without an answer like "what is value?". It's not quite so easy to make your own value proposition, defend it from criticism and prove that your preferred social structure best satisfies that. As such I find Marxists are really good at subversive critique of the existing order, but their ability to demonstrate the utility of their own system is downright anaemic. It is characterised by evasive, wishy-washy arguments meant to distract people from the fact that their vision for society is extremely ill-defined.
Personally, I think we have enough evidence that a Marxist state struggles to grant the majority of its populace even the bottom tier of Maslow's hierarchy and thus fails at the first hurdle. Vietnam's experience with collective production is a pretty illustrative example. Collectivisation nearly starved that entire country and after private production, trade and other capitalisty things were established and bolstered by the government, agricultural production skyrocketed and the populace explicitly stated they considered themselves better off. Is there any better measure of value than the people's own assessment of their well-being? If there is one, I would like to hear it.
I suppose it is always possible that the Vietnamese were brainwashed by the nascent capitalist system into valuing the wrong things... ah, false consciousness, how many issues thou can explain away.
You've admitted that the need for survival and security is "pretty hard to get around". Guess what having weapons is meant to help with? Arms races that involve the production of resources are a fact of life in any remotely multipolar system, and unless you live in delulu land everyone knows they have to participate unless they want to be somebody else's punching bag at best, and wiped off the face of the earth at worst.
Having resources does not directly equal value, no, but it sure helps achieve most terminal goals aside from "starvation, poverty and the slow death of my entire society".
I'm not a Marxist (although I do think they make some good points that are worth taking into serious consideration), so I'm not here to defend Marxism qua Marxism, and I'm certainly not here to defend the specific economic policies of the USSR or China. I just want to help people understand what classical Marxists actually believe, so that when they reject Marxism, they have a better idea of what they're rejecting.
"A state governed by the principles of Marxism" is a bit of a misnomer (besides the fact that Marx thought that advanced communism would bring about the dissolution of the state). Marx was intentionally very light on specific details about how a "communist society" would work; we can say what communism is abstractly, but not concretely. Because communism will involve a fundamental transformation of human subjectivity (according to Marx), it's impossible to predict exactly how it will work, because we can't extrapolate from human behavior under capitalism to predict human behavior under communism.
Marx never said "you have to immediately and forcibly collectivize all farmland". What he did say is that there needed to be a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the proletariat would commandeer state power and use it to begin the process of overcoming capitalism. But no one can decide for the proletariat how they should go about this or what exactly this process should look like; they have to decide it for themselves, concretely, as they struggle through the actual process. (I think the DotP is a bad and unworkable idea for many reasons, which in turn is one of the many reasons why I'm not a Marxist.)
That's largely the point, yes. The best way I heard it explained was, "Marxism was not the proletarian socialist movement; it was the self-critique of the proletarian socialist movement". And I think that's correct. Marx certainly did not invent socialism, the workers' movements preceded him, their demands preceded him. Marxism was intended to be a type of self-criticism that would bring the socialist movement to self-consciousness. The incessant Socratic questioning of the Marxists was directed just as much at the socialists themselves as it was at broader capitalist society, if not more so.
Guilty as charged, yes. I think all the sophisticated ones would admit to this.
Yes of course. I'm no pacifist. I was mainly asking that question as a way of probing faceh's thoughts on value.
Okay, fair enough. Consider my question revoked then. You bring up some interesting points, I have some thoughts on a couple of them.
An aside - Vietnam's implementation wasn't exactly immediate; it was a gradual rollback of the possibility of private enterprise involving multiple steps. It started with the Land Reform Law which involved redistributions of land from landed Vietnamese to those the VCP considered to be impoverished, then progressed towards forming mutual aid teams of farmers who were encouraged to aid each other with work on their fields (which, at this point, they still privately owned) during periods of peak labour demand. Then they created agricultural production cooperatives obligating them to perform collective labour for the state, rewarding them with workpoints, and it was then that the process of collectivising proper started.
I do realise this isn't the main point so I'll move on though.
I have read this and Marx does state the following about the dictatorship of the proletariat:
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible."
"Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production."
"These measures will, of course, be different in different countries."
"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable."
"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes."
"2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax."
"3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance."
"4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels."
"5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly."
"6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State."
"7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan."
"8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture."
"9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country."
"10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c."
"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character."
It's not exceptionally specific, but it's not non-specific, either; many broad goals are laid out, including abolition of land and collectivisation of production by the state, and it notes that this should be achieved via "despotic inroads on the rights of property". This model outlined here actually parallels what a lot of communist countries in effect chose to do; they were in fact loosely following the instructions contained within Marx (and Engels') famous manifesto. I think this model clearly has not worked in any case in which it has been implemented.
Which is an issue when your movement has a strong urge to tear down and then proceeds to have no idea what to do once the much-hated system has been completely dismantled. My perception upon talking to many Marxists in my time around these people is that there isn't that clear of an idea regarding how one would handle the incentive problems, coordination problems, etc that the envisioned society would face. I find many of them don't really have a proper theory of governance; they pretty much just cross their fingers and hope ideology does the work of sorting all these issues out once capitalism is no longer an obstacle.
When you're working on things as complex and fragile as entire societies, you just can't operate like this.
Well, sure. There's been a century of selection bias. The natural thing to do for a communist who thinks their idea of communism would solve its problems is to join a commune. The USA had like a hundred of them in the 19th century. Some lasted a decade or more before failing. The trouble with joining a commune is that that's the point at which you have to have ideas to solve its problems, and if you don't then you're not just being told that communism doesn't work by some capitalist jerk you can ignore, you're just not getting told that It-Wasn't-Real-Communism-Anyway doesn't work by a history book, you're getting told your specific style of communism doesn't work by reality itself.
Part of why the few remaining communists fantasize about seizing entire nations before they get started is that that's a necessary prerequisite for certain "solutions" to the brain drain problem, but I think part of it is this selection bias: the remaining communists must have some excuse not to be communists right now, or after a decade or so of direct experience they'd stop being communists. From China to the kibbutzim, the least unsuccessful communist societies in history managed to hang on in part by becoming steadily less communist.
More options
Context Copy link
Fair enough! I have no interest in defending any of the specific points listed of course. Just one more reason why I'm not a Marxist.
I will point out that 1) the Manifesto was a relatively early work and Marx's political thinking developed as he progressed into his mature works, and 2) it was a polemic intended for general consumption and may not represent the most "nuanced" version of his views. But I don't have any further relevant textual references to cite.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Excellent comment
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Given the quality of your questions, I'm really interested in the way you think about value
What is valuable to you?
I believe I value multiple things, as one might expect. But I suppose if I had to put my "highest" value in as concrete terms as possible, it would be "that which pays respect to the mystery":
(I recommend listening to the whole video if you have time, it's really quite lovely.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link