Any genuine Marxists on here?

Great Debates
21

He’s not wrong. There are hundreds of variants of communist theory in the wild. Trotsky held the Marx/Engels opinion that the goal should be communism in every country, governed by workers councils. The theories that came after that were concessions to the reality that maybe you had to have a revolution in one country at a time, that maybe you needed a party to drive change rather than relying on organic grassroots self-organization. We take it for granted that the Marxist-Leninism we saw in the USSR was more or less what Marx envisioned, but that’s not the case.

So you shouldn’t dismiss unreconstructed Trotskyites out of hand without knowing what you’re talking about. Quite frankly he was right to laugh you off, given your self-described absence of interest in even understanding the subject.

I’m not about to defend gulags and the Stalinist police state. But it’s not as if the USSR was living in a tidy experimental vacuum where they tried an approach and it didn’t work out. Any time someone tried to found a communist state, they found themselves the target of the full force of Western hostility. I mean, let’s be real. The greatest, most fearsome war machine ever created, Nazi Germany, turned its full force against the USSR, who repelled the invasion at a cost of 10 times as many lives as the rest of the allies combined. It is not an overstatement to say that in terms of men and materiel expended, World War II was pretty much between Germany and the USSR. So those aren’t exactly ideal conditions for trying an economic experiment.

Anyhow, I’m not defending Stalin’s excesses or the various other defects of communism. But tell me of another economic or political system that half the world decided needed to be destroyed and delegitimized before giving it a chance to prove itself.

22

Since the USSR helped Germany violate treaties and grow its military, since it allied with Germany to permit WW2, and since it invaded and occupied sovereign nations, I’m not sure what your point is.

23

:dubious:
Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Moses both embraced central planning. I suggest you take up your argument that it “has failed every single time it’s been tried,” with them, or rather with their legacies.

Seriously, the OP is repeating uncritically* laissez-faire* malarkey. It’s not logical to suppose that the failures of imperfect central planners will be outperformed by the chaos of millions of actors acting in pure personal self-interest. In fact, Western societies have not actually been run that way in general, because it’s illogical and a ticket to total social and economic ruin.

24

Eisenhower embraced central planning for national infrastructure, eg the national highway system. He was not in favour of having the US government decide how many factories of what types are to be built in the next five year plan. There’s a rather large difference between those extremes. State Planning of national infrastructure is entirely sensible and can be done in a capitalist framework.

Yes I can dismiss them all out of hand because despite arguing over the differences they all share the same goal -> achieving the utopian classless stateless moneyless communism as the end state of history.

Since this theoretical communist final state is both entirely impossible to achieve due to selfish human nature and is not even a desirable goal - it would be a horrific dystopia… Well effectively thats a dismissal of all forms of communism and I don’t need to waste time studying their details.

25

And Robert Moses operated independently of the government. Neither Mayors nor Governors could afford to fire him. He ran a parallel and independent government. After he resigned in a moment of anger, the state and local governments made sure that no one could ever wield so much power again.

26

And not only that, Robert Moses is not universally admired, he’s a very controversial figure. And you can make a very good case that his central planning was detrimental to the long term development of NYC, because he favoured freeways so much over public transport.

27

Oh. Well, I can dismiss all your arguments out of hand because they’re woefully uninformed and and fallacious. Glad we were able to have this chat.

28

The difference is I’ve given an argument, I’ve attacked the base assumptions of communism (all types, see my OP) and the end goal of communism. If the assumptions are false and the end goal is not obtainable or desirable then everything in between doesn’t matter. Trotsky’s version is just as wrong, he starts from the same assumptions, works towards the same goal and just suggests a different path to get there.

If you disagree then explain to me, why my assumptions are wrong, why I am failing to understand the assumptions of communism or why the end goal of communism is actually obtainable and desirable.

29

No you haven’t. You posted a bunch of assumptions that have no support except that you’ve described them as “common-sense arguments.”

The general way of things is that you educate yourself on the subject, then support why you believe your assumptions are right, and then we can talk about the case you’re making. It’s not our job to give you a free education or justify your half-baked opinions, as “common-sense” as they may seem to you.

30

Ok so which of my arguments are wrong? Why are they wrong? Lets have your counter arguments please.

This is a message board dedicated to fighting ignorance, so go on and explain to me my ignorance. That’s why I started this thread, if you read my OP I actually want to see what a genuine Marxists / Trotskyists / whatever shade of Communist point by point replies would be to my original points., and an explanation of why the end goal of communism is in practise obtainable and desirable.

31

Complaining that communism never had a chance because the Imperialists wouldn’t let it develop in peace is extremely silly, and exposes the central problem of these sorts of Utopian social plans. What happens when cheaters take advantage of the system?

If your Utopian social system can only work if there are no cheaters taking advantage of the system then your social system will never work, because such people will always exist.

Someone like George Orwell was convinced that socialist systems would work so much more efficiently than capitalist systems that a true socialist country would outperform its decrepit and corrupt capitalist/imperialist neighbors. When the economic engine of socialism is so obviously more effective then countries that tried to keep the old ways would just be brushed aside, and pretty soon all advanced countries would be socialist because the advantages would be obvious.

It didn’t exactly work like that in the real world. Every society, to keep existing, has to be able to protect itself from internal and external threats, and socio-politico-economic systems that can’t do that can’t work in the real world.

32

Yes Exactly, and the USSR and China were also working to undermine capitalist societies, the cold war was in many ways a darwinian competition of survival between competing economic ideologies. Capitalism won, that doesn’t mean that it’s “right” or the best system, it just means that at that place in history it was more effective, both at economic development and at protecting itself from external and internal threats. In fact I think you can argue that the major fundamental flaw of communism is it’s weakness to internal threats, it doesn’t have a robust system of checks and balances and cannot tolerate dissenting opinions to the same degree as democratic capitalism, so it inevitably declines into dictatorship.

In future quite likely another economic / social theory will eventually supplant capitalism, and it will almost certainly take a few elements from both capitalism and marxist thought. But the idea that Marx’s theory of history is the one true correct one and that his specific utopian vision is inevitable is purely an act of irrational faith among true Marxist believers. And one that is not supported by the history of the 20th century.

33

As I noted above, a Marxist (as opposed to a Marxist-Leninist) would say that communism happens at its own pace. If you try to force it to happen sooner, you’ll just cause the problems that we’ve seen in historical communist regimes. But if you wait, capitalism will collapse from its own inherent flaws and then true communism will arise. And this true communism won’t have the flaws of Leninist communism.

Obviously, you can’t prove this isn’t going to happen anymore than you can prove the Rapture isn’t going to happen. But you can note some issues that cause the Marxist prediction into question.

The main one is what happened to communism? Part of Marxist theory is that primitive societies practiced communism and it’s mankind’s natural system. If that’s the case then how did class-based systems arise? If early mankind was living in a perfect communist system, why did they give it up? And if these past communist systems were susceptible to the lures of class, why assume future communist societies won’t be as well?

34

I disagree, in the same way you can prove certain combinations of electrons and protons are stable and certain others are not. The final state of classless moneyless stateless communism, would not be stable, it would collapse quickly.

Why? Well lets imagine the world has achieved that state, all is great for 10 years, so then someone decides she wants to try doing things differently and he wants to allocate tokens for people for performing tasks which they can swap for resources. And she’s so persuasive that she attracts a group of followers who agree and they decide to try and do things that way in their local area. They also start trying to gain converts, peacefully, only lecturing and discussing, not using force. Or alternatively someone gets visions and starts a religion and is similarly persuasive.

How does your perfect society deal with that? Any argument that that’s impossible because it will be so obvious to everyone that their current state is perfect is ridiculous. Humanity has a whole has never agreed on anything, and the only methods you could achieve such uniformity of agreement are horrific to contemplate.

In contrast I’d argue that democratic liberal capitalism is a meta stable state or a chaotic attractor in other terms. It can tolerate a wide variety of dissent while still surviving. It’s perfectly legal and tolerated in the US, Australia etc to buy a big chunk of land go out and seek converts and practise communism within your own property with willing participants. As long as you pay taxes and don’t break laws you’re free to do that. You can even go on TV preaching to millions of people about why your system is so great and even try to lobby the local council to change local laws to suit your system better.

The same was never true in any of the “democratic peoples republics” states that we commonly call communist, they knew they were weaker internally to dissent and had to ruthlessly stamp it out using forced political education, re-education camps and executions.

Ok, sure someone is going to mention McCarthyism or FBI infiltration of 60’s left wing groups now, I’m not saying democratic liberal capitalism is perfect or that it has an unlimited tolerance for dissent, just that relatively it’s more so than the alternatives.

35

This is the point I was making. Even if you accept Marxist theory as correct, you have to regard a communist society as unstable. According to Marxism, classes arose within what was a communist society.

36

In hindsight, wasn’t “Marxism” just ethnic (Slavic/Russian) nationalism in disguise?

37

No, not at all. Marx himself wasn’t a Russian and didn’t hold Russia in very high regard (he figured communism would rise in Germany or Britain). The Bolsheviks adopted their version of Marxism and ended up using it as a justification for nationalist claims but I don’t think you can blame Marxism for how it ends up being misused. Russian nationalists could have just as easily used Orthodox Christianity or democracy or free market capitalism as a justification for nationalism.

38

Bolding added - now THAT would be a good scenario - if Russia ever decided to become the world’s Oliver Cromwell and went around crushing dictatorships and theocracies. In fact, I think the world desperately needs that to happen. :cool:
(end hijack)

39

Ok sure, but the idea that “in the beginning we were communist” is also pretty unbelievable given what we know about anthropology and pack structures in animals. I’d argue classes go back to before we were homo sapiens. Hunter Gatherer societies have chiefs or big men, slavery was practised, intra tribal warfare was common, untouchables or lower castes existed long before the capitalist era and they absolutely had a concept of private property. They shared resources within the tribe to survive, but that’s not something you can claim as being unique to communism, plenty of people in capitalist societies also choose to share resources in times of need.

So yeah, we were never communist to start with, pack animals have pecking order and class structures.

I have to say one more thing, the idea that someone who has studied Marxism for years is qualified to criticise modern capitalism seems to me like someone who is an expert on Phlogiston theory criticising modern physics. I’d much rather hear criticism on capitalism from people that have studied modern capitalism in depth, theres certainly plenty of valid points to be made.

40

Hi Coremelt,

This is a great OP!

I wouldn’t call myself a Marxist, for the reason that I wouldn’t identify myself with any philosopher by name. I think any philosopher is going to get some things right and some things wrong. I also have read some Marx, but certainly not enough to say I deeply understand or appreciate his thought. I’d call myself very broadly speaking a communist in that I think that the goal communist societies were striving for was something better than liberal/capitalist societies were striving for, that on balance if I was the leader of a country during the Cold War I would have sided with the eastern bloc (at least after 1956), and that I have hopes something like the communist ideal will someday be achievable. Nevertheless there are a lot of aspects of Marx that I strongly disagree with (starting with, his atheist/materialist metaphysics).

I’ll try to take your points in order. Regarding ‘gulags/death camps’, it’s actually not true that “every communist state devolved” into gulags and death camps. The Soviet Union didn’t have gulags after about 1960, for a start (that’s when the GULAG structure was shut down, IIRC). Nor did they have any famines or mass executions after 1956. For that matter, Cuba didn’t have death camps or mass executions either (they had labour camps for political dissenters, for sure, but death was neither the foreseen nor typical outcome of them- the total number of executions under the Communists in Cuba is estimated as 5,000 by communist sources and 10,000 by opposition sources, either of which compares fairly favourably with most societies emerging from a civil war). Outside Romania and Albania, most of Eastern Europe didn’t either, after the death of Stalin. For me, at least, that indicates that death camps and mass death in general aren’t essential to a communist society, and if you want to lay the blame for them anywhere, it should be at the feet of Stalin (and Mao, in China), not Marx. The overwhelming majority of deaths attributed to “communism” are the fault of literally two people (let’s include Cambodia to make it three), and from a statistical point of view, in my book, three bad leaders aren’t enough to discredit an ideology.

You have a good theoretical case that communism, insofar as it demands the thorough reconstruction of society, demands some kind of authoritarian leadership, at least in the medium term. I’m not a democrat, so authoritarian leadership doesn’t really bother me.

“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)”

Yeah, I’m going to need a cite to that effect. Economic inequality in communist countries was generally well below capitalist ones. (East Germany had a Gini index of around 17, lowest in the world and well below any country today: Czechoslovakia was around 18 as well. The Soviet Union had a Gini index below the US and comparable to western Europe, but that’s biased upwards because it was essentially a European country fused to an Asian country. Individual Soviet republics like Belarus had lower economic inequality than any European capitalist country, and IIRC the most unequal / poorest Soviet republic (Tajikistan) still compared favourably to most Asian countries.

As for party elites, at least as far as eastern Europe and the Soviet Union went, they lived better lives than the ordinary person, unquestionably, but the gap was still lower than between ultra-rich people and ordinary workers in the United States. I’ve heard decent arguments that part of the reason that communism was ended in the former eastern bloc is that much more than failing workers, it was failing elites. Party elites wanted to be able to go on vacation in Spain rather than the Crimea or Dubrovnik, and to afford the luxuries that they knew were available to rich people in the west.

I’ll have to make my response to your criticisms of central planning a separate post, but in brief:

  1. Central planning isn’t the same thing as communism. Communism means the abolition of the capitalist class, and collective ownership of the means of production. (Either by workers’ cooperatives, or by the state on behalf of workers). Worker ownership of firms isn’t incompatible with relying on markets to determine prices and allocation. Yugoslavia was a communist state that also relied heavily on markets and on worker self management. Hungary was a state that used a combination of markets and central planning (in particular, as far as I remember from Alec Nove, they had certain prices that they allowed to fluctuate within a maximum and minimum range, and used that to determine allocative decisions). I think something like the Hungarian model is probably best, personally.

  2. Central planning was never really tried out at its best : the most innovative mathematicians who had ideas about how to reform central planning were sidelined in the 1970s for political reasons. There are also reasons to think that the argument that was supposed to be the knock-down disproof of communism (Hayek’s socialist calculation problem) has been superseded by advances in computer science. Specifically, the number of calculations that Hayek said it would take to plan a communist Soviet Union wasn’t feasible in the 1930s or even the 1930s, but is achievable by supercomputers today.