Any genuine Marxists on here?

Or even ex-marxists that went through a phase, or someone that studied it critically in depth?

I was quite shocked to run into a genuine true believer Marxist in the wild recently, as far as I can tell he seems to be one of the Fourth International / Everything after Trotsky wasn’t communism ones (eg no true scotsman types). Probably foolishly I challenged him expecting to get a rational explanation of his beliefs, but instead just got “HAHAHA you’re too ignorant to understand” followed by intellectual blather about marxist theorists that were not relevant to the questions I was asking, followed by blocking me. BTW this guy is in their 40’s not an edgy 19 year old.

So obviously I think the idea that you can’t criticise marxism if you haven’t read the entirety of Das Kapital and 2000 other pages of commentary is complete bollocks. My common sense arguments against Marxism are these:

• Transitioning to a communist society inevitably concentrates power in a few people without sufficient checks and balances, and inevitably due to human nature leads to an autocracy or dictatorship which is communist in name only ( or makes some lip service to improving the workers lives while really saving all the good stuff for the party elite)
• Empirically thats obvious from looking at 20th Century history, no nation managed to stay in this mythical pure communist state for more then five years, every single example turned into a dictatorship in which death camps and gulags were common rather than a rare exception.
• More empirical evidence: Every single communist state has had a black market selling imported or rare goods for hard foreign currency. If the state was meeting the needs of the people there would be no demand for the services of a black market.
• Central planning has failed every single time it’s been tried, hundreds of millions of selfish individuals making decisions to maximise their own benefit is more efficient at allocating resources than a central committee because economic systems are complex, chaotic and emergent so they can never be reliably controlled by conscious planning of an entity. Possibly strong AI might change this in the future but thats not the case now and thats not the argument I’ve heard true believers say anyway.
• Even if communism could be achieved without the system getting corrupted into a dictatorship it’s a flawed system that would improve the lives of workers less than capitalism tempered with democratic socialism. Inefficiencies of central planning can never be solved and can never compete with the efficiencies of a market economy. Furthermore due to human nature, workers will not work to their capacity based only on abstract ideals, and neither will managers, instead resorting to petty theft and corruption to enhance their lifestyles.
• Loss of profit motive for entrepreneurs / scientists is a massive blow to society, while the soviet union did achieve great advances in Aerospace and some fields of medicine they essentially made very little advances in integrated circuits compared to the western free markets. By the 1970’s the Soviet Union was so far behind in computer / IC design that catching up was not feasible. The improved automation that this allows then lead the capitalist nations to leap further ahead in productivity and living standards even for factory workers.

See, I bet they do have theoretical answers to the above and I’m genuinely interested in knowing what they are, but never found an actual Marxist willing to argue the above rather than just dismissing them as “trivial ignorant concerns”.

Now Democratic european style socialism with universal health care, good regulation of banks and subsidised education, I’m in favour of all those things which puts me pretty far left in most people’s books and capitalism is definitely flawed, but as they say its the worst possible system apart from all the other ones (which are worse).

Any one on here want to fly the red banner and defend Marxism?

I’m no Marxist, but I can see that this is flawed.

Every state, Communist or not, has had a black market selling imported or rare goods or services for hard foreign currency. So by your own argument, no system is able to meet the needs of its people. Even if that were true, since it is true of all systems it isn’t a valid criticism of Communism.

It isn’t true of course. Needs are not the same as wants. People need food, clothing, companionship etc. They may want colour TVs or Rolex watches or ivory keychains or hookers or cocaine or a hitman to murder their wife, but those are not needs. And they may be willing to purchase those things through the black market, but that is not evidence that society is not meeting their needs.

Well capitalism accepts that markets are good, imported luxury goods are generally available freely so there is no black market for them. People in the west never had to go to a black market to buy a television set, or jeans, or imported cheese, all of which was the case in the Soviet Union and other communist block states. I’d argue that because marxism rejects the very idea that a free market is useful it is a larger black mark against them that black markets were ubiquitous in all communist block nations. What black markets that do exist in the west are for narcotics or illegal weapons etc, not for consumer luxury items and imported food.

It also comes back to psychology, people are not soulless workers that are happy with the same bland meal every day and the same grey dungarees to wear and the same spartan apartments as everyone else. Marxism tries to claim that capitalism is what makes us want all these useless luxuries, but the urge to decorate ourselves and use ornamentation goes back thousands of years far beyond ancient Egypt to the first hunter gatherer societies who used tattooing and ochre decoration and pigments from plants and insects to create “luxuries”, including cosmetics and ornamentation. We have always “needed” far more than the basics to survive in order to flourish as a society and thats where I feel Marxism / Communism is extremely weak.

But they did (and still do) have to go to a black market to buy an ivory keychain or cocaine or hookers or a hitman to murder their wife. Because all those luxuries are considered immoral beyond the capacity of a moral and just society to support without exploiting people and the environment. And guess what standard the Soviets used to judge whether a television set, or jeans, or imported cheese were available on the free market? That’s right, exactly the same standard.

You started with a claim that this was empirical evidence against Marxism, and have been reduced to arguing that the subjective standard of what is morally supportable is wrong. That’s as far from empirical as it is possible to get.

Uh huh.

The US rejects the very idea that a free market in ivory is desirable. Somalia does not. There is a larger black market for ivory in the US than in Somalia. Therefore that is a large black mark against the US.

The US rejects the very idea that a free market in 13 year old prostitutes is desirable. Thailand does not. There is a larger black market for 13 year old prostitutes in the US than in Thailand. Therefore that is a large black mark against the US.
And so on ad nauseum.

Surely you can see how flawed that reasoning is? Of course more black markets will exists in states that regulate more excesses. That doesn’t mean that regulating excesses is a bad thing. It certainly is not, as you claimed, empirical evidence that any state that tries to regulate commodities is a failure if a black market for that commodity springs up.

Really?
Are you sure you want to stand by that statement?
Give it some more thought.
Then get back to me.
Although I suppose you will now tell us that an Ivory keychain or an ocelot are not consumer luxury items. Or that meat and cheese are not foods.

How is that claim in any way empirical? Because you said this was empirical evidence. A claim that all people are, and must be, a certain way isn’t empirical is it?

First off, were/are any of these luxuries (tattooing and ochre decoration and pigments from plants and insects) unavailable under any Marxist system? If not then you are either arguing a straw man or demolishing your own argument. People want luxuries such as cosmetics and ornamentation. Cosmetics and ornamentation were available under all Marxists systems.

Secondly, your original claim was that the inability of a Marxist system to provide what people **need **is empirical evidence of failure. Now you have shifted to what people want or have **urges **to do. Once again, that invalidates your argument.

It simultaneously strengthens my argument. People in the US have all sorts of urges that they can only fill o the black market. So what? Are you arguing that any system that doesn’t allow every person to fill every urge is a failure. If not then what is the relevance of the USA or a Marxists system failing to meet every urge of every person?

Do you honestly believe that is an empirical statement?

Read what I’m saying and I am not claiming to have all empirical arguments, I am making empirical arguments and arguments based on an understanding of human nature and game theory arguments based on the observed efficiency of decentralised systems vs central planning. I’m also making a philosophical argument that Marxism is against fundamentals of human nature which is why it can never work.

And anyway sure the existence of a black market may not be any kind of failure of communism, I’ll grant that one for the sake of discussion, but that still leaves all my other points in my OP.

I’ve never been a Marxist but I’ll take a shot at explaining how true believers explain away the apparent failures of communism.

My understanding is that Marxism, in its original state, was a sort of utopian. Marx theorized that the capitalists would just run things into the ground and the workers would suddenly have a moment of clarity and realize the capitalist system was wrong. The workers would take over (which implied some violence towards the remaining capitalists) and a communist system would emerge naturally. In Marx’s view, a communist system would be so obviously perfect there would be no need for force or coercion or even government - everyone would be happy to contribute to the needs of society, there would be enough for everyone’s needs, and nobody would want to take more than they needed. Marx viewed this all as inevitable - capitalism was doomed to fail and communism was destined to arise.

Lenin and most subsequent communists added a new twist to Marxism. They felt that rather than just wait for communism to arise on its own, it was possible to accelerate its arrival. While the majority of workers hadn’t yet realized the perfection of communism, a small group of workers could still create a communist state that would benefit everyone. But in order for this small group to create this system, they’d have to have power over society. These communists would have to temporarily be dictators in order to establish a communist state. But once that communists state was up and running, everyone would see how good it was and the system (as Marx had said) would run itself. Then the dictators could step down because there would be no more need for government. Obviously, no communist society in history has achieved that advanced status yet so they still need the dictators to lead the way.

A true Marxist might still believe in old school Marxism. He’d explain away the failure of communism in the real world by saying Lenin screwed it up by trying to force society to become communist before it was ready. All the success of communism requires is patience enough to wait for it to happen.

I fail to understand how anyone who has read a lot of history could think that’s remotely plausible. Marx was highly educated and well travelled, how could he have such a rose tinted view of history and a lack of understanding of human psychology?

The rest of it is typical no true scotsman arguments, Lenin and Mao certainly claimed to be developing Marxism while staying within it’s framework, but even if you grant that they weren’t “true communism” what you end up with is a nice theory that has no practical application because it’s impossible to implement in a “pure” form with selfish humans without it getting corrupted.

Nor did I state or imply that you did.

You said that this one particular piece of “evidence” was empirical. Now we discover that it is either logically fallacious or else based upon a subjective standard of what constitutes a need versus a luxury, which is hardly empirical.

My understanding is that Marx believed that the industrial/agricultural revolutions had created a new world. For the rest of human history, 95% people had to work full time just to get enough food, clothing and shelter, and most of that 5% had to work as doctors, soldiers etc. By the end of the 19th century, most people could be provided for by a minority of the population, and that trend was set to continue. But instead of most people living a life of leisure, they were working harder than ever before in history. And in Marx’s mind they were working hard just to make Capitalists rich.

So this was a whole new paradigm, which made previous experience of human behaviour redundant. Because people no longer needed to work hard to live, they were no longer governed by the behavioural laws they had been governed by for the rest of history. People in the 16th century never had the opportunity to embrace Communism because they needed to work hard just to stay alive. And people then weren’t exploited to the same degree because, while they certainly produced excess for taxation, they weren’t producing nearly as much. A farmer 1550 might produce an excess 30% food for taxes, and most of that went to essential services like an army and administrators. Getting rid of the nobles wouldn’t make people fundamentally better off because you would still need to pay other administrators. But the industrial/agricultural revolutions meant that people could pay for administrators and armies and still only work 3 hours a day. But instead they were working 14 hours a day. And instead of producing an extra 30%, an average worker was producing as much in one month as she was being paid in 12 months.

So, as Marx saw it, people were working for 47 weeks a year just to support the excesses of the Capitalists who owned the land and the factories. If they somehow did away with those Capitalists, then could work just two hours a day and still have all their needs met. And if they worked just three hours a day they could meet the needs of all those who couldn’t work due to illness.

That had never been an option any time before in history. So how people had behaved previously wasn’t relevant. People in an industrialised world really could engineer a Utopia. And since this Utopia required less work than any Capitalist or pre-Industrial society, then of course people would enter into that system voluntarily. All you needed to do was remove the greedy Capitalists who were sucking up 90% of the resources and everyone could live a life of leisure with perfect social security.

Marx or his contemporaries reading a lot of history didn’t help to highlight the flaws in this thinking because there was never a historical precedent for what was happening to the world’s economy. And being widely travelled didn’t highlight the incompatibility with human nature for the same reason. People at the time thought that people were selfish because life was a constant scrabble just to get enough to survive. They weren’t greedy, they were prudent. Famine was always a real risk, so people scrabbling to save a penny were being prudent, not misers.

Of course we know now that Marx’s theories were a load of dingo’s kidneys. But that’s mostly the benefit of hindsight. We know now that it was the scrabble for wealth by the factory owners and shop owners that was driving the economy, and that if you removed that incentive the economy would stagnate and people would become impoverished. And we know now that people won’t produce any excess or innovate if they can’t earn any additional money for doing so. But those things all that obvious in Marx’s day. Marx, and most other people, really did think that people worked to meet their basic needs and would be happy to do so indefinitely. And they really did think that people who owned factories or shops that operated at large profit margins were being unproductive leeches because they didn’t need a fraction of that money to live. Marx wasn’t alone in those views, they were widespread if not the norm. All that Marx did was extrapolate from them to a Utopian view of what would happen if people stopped working hard to support Capitalists and just worked to support each other.

In a nutshell, Marx thought that, since working people can physically feed and clothe the whole world by working just 2 hours a day, they would naturally opt to live under a system where the whole world was fed and clothed and everyone worked 2 hours day, in preference to the existing system where people work 14 hours a day and 10% of the population is starving and homeless. Seems quite logical on the surface. It’s only that we now know that the economy can’t feed and clothe everyone without growth, and that you can’t get growth if no one is allowed to accumulate wealth that we see the flaws in Marx’s ideas.

But that wasn’t common knowledge at the time, even to the educated and well travelled.

I’m having difficulty telling what this thread is really about since coremelt insists on using communism and Marxism as synonyms. Is he even aware that there are non-Marxist forms of communism?

MrDibble (never a Marxist*, was a communist in his youth)

  • politically, I’m quite happy with academic Marxist theory.

Yes there are but they are a minor footnote on history since no anarcho-communist or christian communists have ever taken over and run a country. So I’m talking specifically about Marxism, Leninism and Maoism which I believe is what most people think of when you say “communism”. They have some minor differences but it’s valid to lump them all as being in the Marxist tradition in the same way we can talk about capitalist societies as a group, even though laissez faire and nordic democratic socialism are very different.

But thats kind of my point, I really don’t believe you have to even understand the differences between those three to have common sense critiques of Marxism / Communism because they all have the same fundamental flaws. Faulty assumptions about human nature that make them impossible to implement in practise.

Except that time they were one of the flavours of anarchism most prevalent in running Revolutionary Spain, you mean? The CNT was a mix of syndicalist and communist tendencies.

Ok thanks for educating me, but its not a refutation to the problems inherent in Marxism / Communism which I state in my OP. In fact you’re basically doing the same thing I’m complaining about, ignoring my actual points and trying to make me look ignorant about Marxist / Communist theory. When a theory is based on faulty assumptions you don’t need to understand it to dismiss it. Garbage in - Garbage Out.

If you trumpet having no understanding of the theory itself, how the hell are we to suppose you have sufficient understanding of the underlying assumptions to find them faulty?

And blithely continuing to equate Marxism and Communism in your reply to me shows you weren’t educated in the slightest. Done with this thread - you want to rail against Marxist Communists, be my guest.

If memory serves, Olentzero is a Marxist.

I never said I have no understanding of the theory, and I’ve given my reasons for questioning the assumptions of underlying it. I would expect a reasonable response would be “you’re wrong about these assumptions because actually thats not what we assume”, or “you’re wrong to question these assumptions and this is my reasons for justifying my assumptions”. Communism means what it means in everyday usage, thats how language works, sorry but you’ve lost control of the everyday meaning of it. And Yes I understand that Communism is technically actually the magical utopia which is the end goal of marxism / socialism, but thats not what the average punter thinks it means.

So again this is my point, are any Marxists willing to actually debate their assumptions? Because if you will only debate with people that accept your assumptions and have studied the theory on your own terms then thats a cult, not any kind of social theory that can be sensibly debated.

So either tell me why your assumptions are right or tell me why I’m wrong about your assumptions?

You are correct, sir. I am a friend of Olentzero IRL and can confirm this in general terms, though I cannot recall to which specific sub-category of Marxist/Communist thought he subscribes. Perhaps a PM by the OP to him might elicit a response?

Okay, let me play devil’s advocate.

Look at a typical family. One or more members of the family will produce the majority of the income. Other members of the family consume far more than they produce. But that’s regarded as perfectly acceptable. So we see one of the most fundamental elements of human society operates on the basis of “From each according to their abilities; to each according to their needs.”

Marxism would tell you that this demonstrates the humans are fundamentally communist by natural instinct. They operate on a communist system at their most basic levels, like families and small tribes. It’s only at the level of larger groupings that competitive systems arise. So Marxists would say that it’s these competitive systems, like capitalism, that are artificial. All we need to do is reject this artificial capitalist system and get back to our natural communist system.

Not in any family that i have ever seen. All adult members are expected to produce in equal amounts. This is especially true between spouses. AFAIK every marriage counsellor in the world agrees that if one partner believes that they are giving mre than they are getting, he relationship is doomed. It really is that clear cut: if one partner thinks they are producing more than their fair share, the marriage is over.

That doesn’t mean “income”, but then Communism never mean income. It meant labor. One partner might produce the majority of the income, but the other partner has to provide an equivalent value, whether that is value is in terms of emotional support, sex or social status. Both partners in a relationship have to perceive that they are getting an equitable return on what they invest.

With extended families, this also largely holds true. The exception being when old and invalid parents or grandparents live in the household. But in those cases the care they receive is based upon a notion of repaying a debt and paying forward care from ones own children.

Children, of course, aren’t expected to contribute as much, but then every mammal species takes care of helpless young. That doesn’t make a good analogy because socialism is about interactions between adults.

So we see even the most fundamental elements of human society operates on the basis of “everyone has to feel they are getting a fair deal, or the relationship breaks down”.

Which tells me that Marxists have never actually been in a relationship. A relationship is hard work and if one partner feels that they are contributing more than they are getting, the relationship is in real trouble.

The problem isn’t competition. The problem is reciprocity. Even in a marriage, if the wife feels that she is working and the husband isn’t, the only likely outcomes are that she walks, or else she starts slacking off too.

Conversely, if a wife feels that she “needs” to slacken off and that her husband is obligated to support her because he is “able” to work harder to pick up the slack, the marriage is also in trouble unless this was discussed and agreed on in advance.

Which is one of the many obvious problems with Communism. It relies on *everybody *working as hard as they are able to support those who are in need, but it lacks any mechanism whatsoever to discuss what people need or what they are capable of. As a result anyone who is simply unmotivated can stop working because they believe they are unable to go to work today, and they will have the same needs met whether work or not.

I realise you are only playing devil’s advocate, but the idea that any grown person could believe that relationships aren’t based on equitable, reciprocal returns is more ludicrous than actual Marxist philosophy.

To be fair I don’t believe thats 100 percent true. The Soviet Union and China under Mao had extensive exams and testing procedures and in theory you’d be assigned to an area where your skills could be put to good use. In practise however only the children of party members would be able to get into the good universities and if you were branded as a “counter-revolutionary” then both you and your children would be sent into the country to do do manual labour even if you were educated.

But yes another fundamental problem is that achieving the end goal of stateless classless communism requires everyone to believe that goal is worthy and dedicate full effort towards achieving it. Dissidence cannot be tolerated and the end goal of the utopian classless stateless society justifies any manner of attrocities. In fact if such an end goal of classless stateless moneyless communism was reached, it would not be a utopia, it would be a never ending dystopia since the only way to reach that goal would be extreme measures to keep people in uniformity, constant political education to the point of brain-washing, use of psychoactive drugs to keep people compliant, torture, imprisonment and execution for those that can’t be forced to obey.

The widespread corruption that is endemic in communist regimes is pretty much impossible to explain, even in theoretical terms. Even if you buy the claim that a totalitarian dictatorship is a necessary step on the road to an ideal communist state, how do you justify those dictators and their families enjoying conspicuous luxuries? You can theoretically justify a dictator needing power to carry out his mission but how do you justify him needing a fleet of limousines or a home theater or an olympic swimming pool?