Any genuine Marxists on here?

Great Debates
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Continued…

  1. A somewhat lower economic growth might be justified if it had other compensatory benefits. I think the communist states (or the best of them, at least: I’m not going at all to step to the defence of Mao in China, who was just a disaster) did have such benefits. Lower inequality for one, and (for another) better job prospects for low-education workers, i.e. the kind of people that the modern United States (and some modern western European countries) are leaving behind. I think Keith Gessen puts it really well here:

“Industrial work was championed by the Soviets, both in word and in deed: coal miners in Donbass earned on average two or three times what a software engineer like my father earned in Moscow. (In the early 1980s, Bik had been working as a miner for just a few months when he bought a motorbike. The girls went crazy for it.) When the Soviet Union ended, the entire country experienced what Nietzsche might have recognised as a transvaluation of all values: what had been good was now bad, and what had been bad was now good…”

  1. The claim that markets thus far have outperformed central planning in terms of economic growth is strong enough to be true on the whole (in my opinion) but it’s also a lot weaker than many people to think. To summarize the problems with the claim as a whole: it’s true mostly of Europe and Asia (definitely not true of Africa or of Latin America), it’s arguably not true of the richest communist country, East Germany (if Gerhard Heske’s estimates are right, and I’m not an economist or a historian but he seems to be fairly well cited, then the GDR had a slightly higher economic growth rate than West Germany during its overall history as well as during the last decade of its existence), it’s greatly weakened when you look at median rather than average income (the Soviet Union during the worst of the stagnation era, 1975-1985, had higher median income growth than the US), and it’s also greatly weakened when you consider the stagnation for working class people that the United States and other western countries have entered since the 1980s. (Median income in the US since 1975 has grown at 0.55% per year, which again is lower than in the Soviet Union on the eve of Gorbachev’s appointment to power).
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As a final comment, the people you should really be arguing this with isn’t me, it’s the former denizens of communist countries. This poll is informative:

as is this one:

both from the Levada Center. (Their political orientation such as it exists is liberal / anticommunist / anti-Putin).

In brief, over 70% of Hungarians in 2010 felt that they were better off under communism, as did most Slovaks, Bulgarians, and most surprising of all Lithuanians and Ukrainians. I haven’t seen more recent citations for eastern Europe, but a series of polls in the last year or two indicates that Russians, to the tune of 55-60%, think communism was a better economic model than market capitalism. In general, pro-commie sentiment tends to be higher among older people, i.e. the ones who actually experienced it. So it seems to me the case for capitalism, at the very least isn’t self evident or ‘common sense’, as you suggest, since in many countries, a large majoritiy of people who lived under both communism and capitalism seem to prefer the former.

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Communism doesn’t mean perfect equality. Communist states certainly treated people differentially, and celebrated people, based on things like academic achievement, athleticism, amount of labour hours that you put in, military service and so forth. What they didn’t believe in was that differences in economic return were justified purely based on some people owning capital and others not. Most of them (Cuba during the early 1960s and China are exceptions) certainly had incentive-based pay. Their main problem with that was that in the absence of market signals they relied on ‘quantitative’ as opposed to qualitative incentives, e.g. paying truck drivers by the amount of kilogram x kilometers they carried, which led to a preference for longer journeys and heavier loads. That’s certainly a problem any planned economy needs to deal with, but its’ a separate problem from ‘treating everyone equally’ which communist countries certainly didn’t do.

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I rather like Oliver Cromwell, but he was certainly not an opponent of either theocracy or dictatorship. (He was in fact a theocratic dictator, and would have happily accepted the description. ‘Rule of the Saints’ is virtually the definition of theocracy.)

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Hector Saint Claire, first thank you for taking the time to address my points and not dismissing them. You do raise some good counter arguments which are worth thinking about more deeply.

The points I feel you didn’t address or which I have problems with are these:
•“I’m not a democrat, so authoritarian leadership doesn’t really bother me.”

What does this mean? Say I’m in one of your socialist societies that are working towards the final state of communism. I don’t agree with your goal, I do my allocated work but I also write articles critical of the government in my spare time, give speeches in public places and encourage others that agree with me to do non-violent resistance. What do you do with me?

•“the people you should really be arguing this with isn’t me, it’s the former denizens of communist countries”

I live in asia and I’ve spoken with people in China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, in those countries certainly the majority is much more content now that they have free market economies and relatively more freedom. They might officially support the local “communist party” but that party is really just an autocratic capitalist party with some socialist leanings now, none of them have any illusion any more that they are working towards the communist ideal.

•“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)”

Ok well first East Germany was a showcase for the USSR so they subsidised it from the rest of the Soviet block, but still I’d argue that too low a GINI is a bad thing, just as too high a GINI is a bad thing. It should be at a level to provide incentive and attract the best entrepreneurs, scientists and other talents without being so high as the current US which I agree is ridiculous.

•“In brief, over 70% of Hungarians in 2010 felt that they were better off under communism” and others

So why is that that all Soviet bloc / China / SEA Communist countries including Hungary all made it extremely difficult or impossible to leave the country, while the same was not true in the west? There was a trickle of people that defected to the USSR or elsewhere during the cold war but there was a far bigger flood coming the other way. If a social / economic system is good then it should be able to attract and keep the best people voluntarily, it shouldn’t have to resort to holding it’s citizens hostage and censoring all information about the alternatives. If it’s a better system then it will naturally win out without such restrictions.

• Regarding the claim that the natural state was communism and then classes developed. This is an assertion so it’s your task to prove it, so far I haven’t seen anything convincing that makes me think that our natural state is communism before civilisation developed. Communism has specific attributes, whats your proof that our pre civilisation societies had those attributes? The fact they shared resources is not enough.

• You didn’t address my point at all that the final state of communism is actually an undesirable and unattainable goal. It sounds horrific to me, why should I want that?

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It’s all much more simply stated than is often assumed. Huge amounts of baggage go along with the Marxist label as a consequence of 20th C geopolitics. If you pare it back to just what Marx thought, however:

Marx’s thinking had two key flaws.

[ul]
[li]Firstly he didn’t understand the limits on human thinking and motivation. Ants maintain motivation to work through simple biology and so will continue to work even when they have no idea why they are doing what they are doing. Humans are motivated - in significant part - by their own cognition, which means that once humans can’t see how what they are doing benefits them, they lose motivation. Any very large production system reaches a point where people will tend to become unable to see how their effort (or lack thereof) makes a difference to the outcome. This is of course always assuming that central planning can actually organise things effectively and efficiently, a bit of a moot point.[/li]
[li]Secondly he didn’t adequately consider sources of power beyond the economic. He thought that once capital was controlled by a community rather than individuals, the lack of differences in financial power would result in fair and equitable government. But of course there are ways of obtaining and abusing power other than by having money.[/li][/ul]
The rest is baggage and anti-commie propaganda. I don’t see any inherent reason why Marxist thought leads to fascism or dictatorship any more than capitalism. There is nothing inherently democratic about capitalism or inherently undemocratic about Marxism.

Really, dictatorial and corrupt societies seem to me to be something of a default state. “Western” countries are relatively exceptional in being relatively democratic and non-corrupt. That countries with Marxist leanings have tended towards dictatorship and corruption doesn’t seem to me to say much more than that it’s damn hard to maintain a democratic non-corrupt society under any economic system.

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Point one, yes exactly even if perfect communism is achieved a charismatic individual using emotional rhetoric will certainly be able to convince people to follow them against it. We have ample evidence of that.

Your second point, communism requires authoritarianism as a key point on the transition from capitalism to socialism to the future perfect communism, they freely admit that. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, actually carrying out that transition requires perfect leaders with no egotistical goals or lust for power, eg it’s impossible.

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I am a Marxist.
I am a Groucho Marxist. Read our Manifesto. If you get an order of Manifesto & the Red Wine, you get a Cannoli, according to your needs…

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Hi Coremelt,

I don’t think I argued that “pre civilization” societies were communist, I simply argued that (some) differences in status don’t prove that they weren’t, since status differences exist in every society. Generalizing about ‘pre-civilized’ societies would be kind of meaningless anyway since they were all very different from another. To try to fit them into a modern mode of production, we would need to look how property was owned. There is one civilized premodern state that some people have argued was proto-communist, and that would be the Inca Empire, since they had collective land ownership, state control of labour and resources, etc…

I certainly agree that people in China are better off today than they were under actual communism. Mao and his successors horribly mismanaged the economy. I don’t know enough about Vietnam and Laos to say. I think the case is much less clear when it comes to eastern Europe, and when it comes to the former Soviet Union there’s a lot of consistent evidence from public opinion polling since 1991 that very shortly after the USSR collapsed and the constituent countries embraced capitalism*, people started very much regretting their decision. (Actually, the last opinion polls taken during communism, in the Gorbachev era when there was some measure of freedom of speech, suggested that most people wanted market-oriented reforms but broadly supported the overall goals and values of communism).

Regarding emigration controls, yes, the communist states certainly had them, East Germany most famously. This isn’t necessarily because people as a whole were all that unhappy: clearly some people were happy and some people weren’t, as with most societies. It’s because the people who were unhappy with communism represented disproportionately highly educated professionals with skills that were critically important for a modern economy. They wanted to leave, at least in part, because they could make much more money in the West. Doctors are a great example: in the case of East Germany, the flood of skilled professionals to the west between 1945-1961 was so massive that in some towns not a single doctor was left. So you have to balance on the one hand, the right of the doctor to leave for a country where he can make more money, and on the other hand, the right of
ordinary people in his community to medical care. I don’t think that shows that a society which pays doctors only (let’s say) 50% more than manual workers is a bad society, it just indicates that if such a society exists, it’s going to need strict emigration controls.

The Soviet Union may have subsidized east Germany to an extent (the sources I’ve seen disagree), but my understanding is in general it’s more that they left it alone to a greater extent than other Warsaw Pact countries. Because as you suggest, they wanted it to be a showcase. And it’s counterbalanced by the fact that they massively stripped the East German economy between 1945 and 1950, and paid below-cost prices for some goods imported from east Germany, on the grounds that East Germany needed to pay reparations for World War II. By 1950, east german per capita income was only 40% of western. For comparison, it’s around 66% today, and depending on whether you believe the pro-GDR or anti-GDR sources, it was either 55% or 33% of west german per capita GDP in 1990. the former would mean they outperformed west German growth rates under communism and underperformed once they switched to capitalism, the second would mean the reverse.

N.B. Even if East Germany did have a slightly higher growth rate than West Germany 1950-1990, which I believe, I still would agree with anticommunists that’s quite disappointing: they should have had a much higher growth rate since they were starting from a lower base. This is grounds enough for me to think that if the world is ever going to see a communist state emerge again, it will have to have a large role for market or quasi-market prices at the start, along the lines of Hungary or maybe even Yugoslavia. And maybe move towards more planning as information technology gets more and more advanced.

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I kind of disagree with you regarding incentives, since first of all, most communist states with the exception of China and the early stages of Cuban communism, did have pay differentials and incentives to work hard, to take dangerous or difficult jobs, to live in cold parts of the country that needed development, etc… These pay differentials were smaller than in the west, but maybe the ones in the west are too high: I’m not convinced that a doctor needs to make, say, six times as much money as a manual labourer to want to do his job well. Secondly, there are other kinds of incentives besides financial ones. Moral incentives (patriotism, the approval of the group, a sense of duty, etc.) are weaker than the Cubans thought, but they do exist, and a healthy society would put them to good use.

The Soviets’ and others’ big problem with incentive based pay wasn’t that incentives didn’t exist, it’s that their planning often wasn’t good enough to ensure that incentives were paid for the right things (e.g. the thing about truckdrivers, which Nove cites in his book on the Soviet economic system).

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You really need to stop playing bait’n’switch between Marxism and communism. If you aren’t debating honestly then I’m bailing and leaving you to your talk to yourself. And if you don’t know the difference then you need to learn it.

There is no obvious reason why authoritarianism is necessary to achieve Marxism (assuming Marxism is viable, which for other reasons I don’t think it is, see above). One could simply have a democracy in which an overwhelming majority vote to and then do remove the means of production from private ownership etc.

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And here I was thinking a quick vanity surf wouldn’t produce much in the way of anything new around here. (It’s really all I do when I show up, to be honest.)

Fuji and Quartz are correct; I’ve been a Marxist for nigh on to three decades now (specifically Trotskyist - heavy criticisms of the USSR, China, Cuba, North Korea, and the former Eastern Bloc; a theory of how revolution can happen in other countries; an orientation on the self-activity of the working class; wrestling with questions on how to relate to the entire working class in general and to its more politically advanced elements in particular). And, more often than not, I’m quite happy to discuss these issues with all sorts of people.

Having read the OP, however, this is one of the ‘not’. Instead of addressing anything Marx (or Engels, or Lenin, or Trotsky) may have actually said, there is an intellectually lazy dismissal of actually reading the source texts before subjecting them to criticism, and ‘common sense’ arguments that are really only straw men responding to claims of what Marx said without any actual backup. (The logical consequence of justifying not having to actually read anything.) Been down that road with many of the Teeming Millions before, and tbh I have better things to do with my time these days.

TL;DR:
Try actually reading some Marx before you ask someone like me to defend it.

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Karl Marx: “Make the rich pay.”

Groucho Marx: “Make the rich play.”

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I’m also a self-identified Marxist, and I agree with Olentzero: the problems with the OP are so manifold that it is difficult to see a way to meaningfully debate it. Half of it rests on a lack of knowledge, manifested by the rather common but nonetheless wrong equivalence between Marxism, Socialism, and Communism. The other half rests on sheer ignorance of historical truth. Virtually none of the OPs historical claims are true: its examples of historical communist regimes were not Communist; its description of why central planning does not work neither specifies what it takes to be central planning nor why it does not work, when clearly it works splendidly very often (in the UK in World War II, in South Korea after World War II, and, of course, in any sufficiently large company every day); its recourse to an entirely mythical (well, worse: ideological) conception of what “human nature” is is just par for the course for this board, where defenders of capitalism will always have to recur to it, despite the fact that anthropologists beg to disagree about it–and one thinks they should know, given that they study human nature 24/7.

I’d still be happy to walk the OP through some of his or her questions about Marxism, but not to defend it against strawmen built on a fundamental misreading of history.