In the Fascism thread (and let’s not go there again), Olontzero was very unhappy, and left in a huff, over my disparaging comments about Marx.
Specifically, Marx was a jerkass and a fruitcake.
I stand by this. Unlike most Marxists, I read Marx. I can see why they’d avoid it, too, seeing as how it would torpedo most of their hopes and dreams to find out that the founder of Marxism (regardless of his personal views of his followers) was a titanic buffoon.
While I can’t argue over everything, here is a short version of Marxism, as described by the man himself.
The world is divided up into capitalists and workers. Well, it wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. Marx never understood the very Industrial Revolution he thought would bring about his Communist Utopia.
Work sucks. Marx felt factory work was demeaning and dehumanizing. In this, he was partly right. But only sometimes and he ignored that a lot of work really sucks. In fact, increasingly more automated factories make work less unpleasant, at the least, and sometimes really cool - which some other writers recognized even as Marx was trying to foment revolution.
He claimed that the Communists would organize the proletariat and overthrow the bourgoisie as a total social class. This really can’t happen for several reasons. The
Communism is scientific. Marx explicitly distanced himself from previous SOcialists by rejecting a Romantic basis for Communism. Ironically, COmmunism still appealed far more heavily to the Romantics, because all Marx did was claim an inevitable chain of causation for the future and claim his reasoning was “scientific”. In fact, this is magical thinking at its worst.
The bourgousie will spark the revolution by attempting to keep their own heads above water in an economic downturn. Well, the best I can say for this is that it’s charmingly naive. Marx evidently thinks that capitlists have unlimited ability to control the price of labor, and that they will never accept a cut in income in bad times. Neither is true at all. In fact, I can’t think of any capitalist country where this generally holds true - it is ironically only in Communist countries where this could routinely happen, and did in Russia and North Korea at the least.
Total State control. Many believe that Lenin turned Marx’s . In actually, Lenin simply changed a one-step world revolution to a nation-by-nation revolution. His economic princples of total state control came directly from Marx, who called for total state control of all capital resources, confiscation fo property of anyone who didn’t toe the line, taking all property in land and a heavy progressive tax of everything else, forming all workers into mass industrial armies, the use of corporations and so forth as tools of the state for mobilizing said workers, the requirement that everyone work, and the forcing of children into state schools.
I figure that ought to get the ball roling. It’s also worth pointing out that Marx and his set were pretty bourgoise themselves, held considerable wealth, and abused their influence extensively to maintain control over the Communist Internationale. Right from the start, Communists were tyrannical, contemptuous of actual workers as opposed to the theretical ones they loved, and selfish.
Your last paragraph though is a riff on what many extreme leftists say nowadays, and that is the old chestnut that “communism has never really been tried, that it was twisted and corrupted in the former USSR.”
I generally don’t like to respond too quickly (it tends to shut out debate), but one major issue is that technically, they are right. The problem is that I’m not sure it could be any other way. Socialism predated Marxism, but Marx both shared their zeal for a perfect world and influenced future Socialists. Socialism and Communism look forward to a perfect world. And there is no known way to get there from here, assuming there really exists.
This needs to be pointed out over and over, I think. Marx wouldn’t have had to work a day of his life if he didn’t want to, and there were long stretches of time where he just didn’t work because he didn’t feel like it. The dude suffered from some epic rich guilt.
Given that Marx was a theoretician rather than politically active himself, you might do better by actually quoting to him and pointing out where you disagree, rather than putting your own interpretation of what Marx said in its place.
Because, you know, some people might not believe your neutrality in your assessment of Marx’s views.
While I have read only a little bit by Marx and just a bit more about his theories…
Please elaborate.
True. But then, I don’t think anyone had a clear grasp of how to build a stable nation in the conditions brought about by the Industrial Revolution until some time after WWII.
Fail to see the point. Are you saying that since the IR only really cool work needs to be done, so the working man should enjoy what he’s doing for a living, or what? Please elaborate.
Agreed.
Points 4 & 5 also agreed, AFAIK.
Maybe, but what a state-by-state strategy means in practice, is a state build for war (if not for offense, other states will attack you for such a strategy eventually). That’s at least part of where the strong top-down hierarchical system in the USSR came from, and it’s also IMHO what strengthened the hierarchical system in Nazi Germany.
Must say I can’t really see any other ultimate consequence of Marxist ideals in practice, though.
I think Marx wasn’t so much a loon, as very naive. As for Lenin et al, anyone who can manage an actual revolution in bloody Tsarist Russia is obviously not a nice person
I think Wong takes things slightly wrong here and there, but he had a bit more time to peruse it, and his look is basically correct. This is handy because he breaks things down bit-by-bit.
You’re confusing Marx with Engels. Marx was dead broke most of his life, and if you’ve ever taken a good look at the sheer size of his collected works, you’d get the (correct) impression that he was rarely, if ever, idle. Engels, on the other hand, didn’t need to work, but worked hard at a job he absolutely hated (at his father’s factory) to help support Marx because he believed Karl was on the right track and would rather give Marx the time to study and write. Marx took forever to write Capital, but it probably wouldn’t have even gotten completed (as much as it was complete) if Marx had had to work the equivalent of a 9 to 5. Much as smiling bandit would like to think Marx pulled everything out of his ass, works like Capital and the Manifesto were the result of months and years of studying and keeping very close tabs on current events.
Axe to grind? Absolutely. But it was the same axe held by hundreds of thousands of working hands back in the day when he was still writing, and by billions of working hands today.
villa, both Marx and Engels were very much politically active as the times permitted. The Communist Manifesto wasn’t written over a couple of beers by the fireside but as an effort to clarify the political views of an organization that was just beginning to emerge in the wave of European revolutions in 1848. When the First International started coalescing in England, Marx and Engels were elbows deep in the middle of it. From some of your posts it seems you’re sympathetic, which is cool, but don’t sell Marx and Engels short.
I’ve read the text. I’m just not convinced you have or that you are willing to present it accurately. If you can point to specific elements of Marx you disagree with, I’ll spend the effort to challenge your interpretations. But your interepretations on their own, given the source, are valueless.
Well, I come from the point of view that Marx did had good ideas (Social security, 8 hour workdays, paid vacations and many other things we take from granted are directly or indirectly here because of Marx), but his biggest failure was to dismiss democracy IIRC. I however have to agree with his general point that societies evolve.
It is just that I also think that Lenin and buddies wanted to make the new society run when all over the world Capitalism had not finish his development yet, IMHO if humanity had to spent 10,000 to finally figure out that Slavery and Feudalism was wrong I think that we should reach the consensus several decades into the future that some levels of socialism are OK to use. Communism? Wait longer than 10,000 years.
Politically active was the wrong term. I meant that one should look at Marx in a different way to the way one looks at Lenin, for example. With Lenin, we can examine his writings, which include some incredibly important things, but we can also look to the practical results of his actions as a political leader. We don’t have that database with Marx, and therefore if we are to discuss him, it should be by looking at his own words, not his own words filtered by someone who views him as “a loon with an axe to grind.”
I guess “Marx had an axe to grind!” isn’t exactly a revalation, what with the whole Communist Manifesto and suchlike. Yeah, turns out Marx was an advocate for communism, rather than a disinterested historian or political scientist.
He had some pretty good insights about how the capitalist class supplanted the aristocrats.
But yeah, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China, Marxism as an ideology has been consigned to the ash-heap of history. You’ll find few Marxist parlor pinks wandering around coop bookstores and run down coffee shops and the occasional message board or English departmant faculty lounge, but that’s about it. Marxism is a spent force, and pretending that anyone who matters cares about it is silly.
Declaring yourself a Marxist is equivalent to declaring yourself someone whose views should not be taken seriously. It’s like declaring yourself a believer in the gold standard, or Uri Geller, or that the 16th Amendment was never ratified. However, Marxists are merely tiresome poseurs, rather than loathesome monsters.
Marxists I’ve dealt with in cultural studies argue about Marxism in a way that has it evolving and changing as society changes, which they argue is the natural course of society and the economy changing. So, in effect, while Marx is the foundation for Marxism, he is not the be all end all. Whether his theories are “wrong” or “right” for 21st century occidental society is sort of besides the point. His theories and foundations have been adapted by Trotsky, Lenin, Mao, and all sorts of other cuddly types whose names elude me.
I am not a Marxist, but it seems to me that he had many reasonable observations about the world with regards to 19th century industrial economics. Commodity Fetishism is a term my fellow musicologists like to throw around, and it has a quaint sort of explanatory power when dealing with issues of marketing, brand power and advertising in contemporary society.
Marx fails, IMHO, when he takes these analyses, and then extrapolates an end point as to how society shapes up, and what is going to happen, and what the intended action plan of people should be. Being a good analyst of the past and present does not necessarily mean you will predict the future with any great accuracy.
Is he a loon? Not more so than the people who pass pamphlets about him at the college quad. He was responding to Dickensian work conditions in 19th century France and England. The fact that it seems inapplicable and repugnant to us today does not retroactively make him crazy.
Well, according to one of my professors, Marx was kind of one of those smelly old kooks who hang out in the library and annoys everyone. He said that one big mistake is making Marx out to be this huge boogeyman.
(And before anyone says anything, this was a man from the USSR, had spent time in a Siberian gulag, and had to defect to the US. He was DEFINITELY an anti-Marxist)
The problem is that while Marx looked at a problem (the major exploitation of the working man, and the horrible conditions of labor at the time) and correctly diagnosed it – but came up with a completely wrong solution.
(And IIRC, didn’t he once say that communism would never work in Russia? He was invisioning it happening in Germany or England – an idustrialized country)
IIRC you are correct. Marx envisioned the revolution to come to industrialized countries first. antonio107’s remark about Dickensian conditions isn’t far off the mark.
Matter of fact, I still don’t quite understand how the Russian revolution happened.
It probably wouldn’t have without the huge social upheaval caused by the Great War, or at least wouldn’t have at that time and in that way. The staggering casualties of the Great War caused massive social change throughout Europe. They also had huge impacts on the class structure - if you look at England, for example, the traditional ruling classes suffered extremely heavy losses (being heavily overrepresented at the onset of war in the junior officer ranks which had the highest percentage casualties). Those who benefited most were the manufacturing classes, who gained vast profits from government contracts, while the working classes provided cannon fodder for the trenches and suffered at home through shortages and brutal working conditions. There are photos of working class streets without doors from the time, because the families had to burn the doors to stay alive because of fuel shortages.
This was true throughout Europe. The Tsar and his family lived in luxury while the lower classes died and starved. That itself creates revolutionary feelings, and then when you see the mismanagement of the war in Russia, the question isn’t so much why there was a Russian Revolution, but why there weren’t revolutions in every country.
I think both you and Guin are talking about Marxism-Leninism, which advocated, in part, the practical implementation of Marxist theory through violent revolution. Marx didn’t exactly describe how workers would come to power.
Lenin’s take on Marxism theorized that communism is only possible in an industrialized society (such as Germany at the time), but a revolution could not take place in such an industrialized society. As a result the workers’s revolution would have to take place in a pre-industrial society (such as Russia at the time), and from there be exported to the industrialized country through war, thus creating a truly communist society.
No, Marx said that if the revolution happened in Russia, it would have to be as the spark that set off further revolutions in Europe, where capitalism (and the working class it creates) was far more developed.
Lenin and Trotsky said the exact same thing during the Russian Civil War: “Without Germany we shall perish.” The obshchina had, by then, completely disappeared, but the principle was still the same - Russia needed the support of the more industrially developed countries of Europe, which it could in turn provide with foodstuffs from its fields.
I’d thought someone remarked on the inevitability of Stalin in here; perhaps it was the other thread. In any case I’d like to point out an illustrative point in Russian history that, to me, shows Stalinism wasn’t inevitable. Round about 1923 there was one of the last major debates within the Party (the Bolsheviks had a lively history and tradition of debate both before and for a time after the Revolution) about the way forward since the revolutionary tide that had followed 1917 appeared to be subsiding in Europe. Trotsky and the group known as the Left Opposition argued very strongly for a program of light industrialization aimed at improving the standard of living of the working class, thereby bolstering their will to defend the Revolution and work towards spreading it, whereas Stalin’s group favored heavy industrialization so as to render Russia able to compete militarily with the West. Stalin won out, obviously, but by using unsocialist, apolitical methods that were unheard of within the party even a few years previously. Communists in the Party saw an alternative and fought as best they could for it; had they won, the history of the Soviet Union might have been radically different. The point is, that choice was there and people saw it. Stalinism was not the inevitable outcome.
lalenin, yes he did. Marx drew very specific lessons from the Paris Commune of 1871 about how workers would come to power, and made the only significant changes he and Engels felt were needed to the Manifesto as a result.
