I’ve been reading with interest a couple of the recent threads concerning the tenets of your philosophy, or faith, including this one. I must say that there are some intriguing ideas presented here, and I’m all for anything that could improve my life, the lives of my friends and family, and assuming this can be done without destroying the lives of one group or another, society as a whole. The question here is, how would adopting the sort of society you propose materially improve my life?
I believe I’ve got pretty good proletariat credentials. I’ve labored continuously from the time I was 18, and although I attended some college courses part-time back in the '70s I have no degree. I was a heavily exploited railway clerk for several years after my high school graduation; after being laid off for the third time, I picked up a job working in geological labs on oil rigs, for a French-based service company with which I am still associated. I’m now a training instructor and technical writer for the US branch operation. I’m now 49 years old, pull down about 56K a year gross, rent a modest but pleasant 2 bedroom apartment in a Houston suburb, and own a car for which I paid cash in late 2000.
It’s apparent from the linked thread that at least some people here feel a dictatorship of the proletariat is really the way to go. Thing is, I don’t actually want to be anyone’s dictator. Furthermore, while not every single thing in my life is perfect, it certainly ain’t bad. I’ve somehow managed to lead an ethical and personally rewarding life within the constraints of our far-from-perfect society. Thus, if we must, as some here apparently say, scrap this society in its entirety, I’d like to know: what’s in it for me?
As side questions, does my current position, in and of istself, make me a bad person in the eyes of the Marxists here? That is, in your view am I too well off for what I do, or don’t deserve what I have at the moment?
Good thread, Mr K. I was thinking of asking one of our resident comrades to open an “as the Marxist” thread. I don’t have much time right now, but I’ve got lots of question I’d like to ask.
It doesn’t even sound nice if you anlyze the theory.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
That’s frightening on the face of the statment itself. Who determines my “ability”? Notice how the sentence structure is in the imperative. That’s why the Communists were always running up against deadlines and faking production to avoid The Boss.
Captialism is a state of nature. That’s how industry and human endeavor naturally evolve. You can put a veneer of socialism over capitalism, or you can put some capitalism into Communism, but Communism by itself always leads to starvation, ruin, and murder.
Second, doesn’t it benefit me if I try to appear needy? Isn’t that turning society upside down? Oh yeah, it is. That’s why they always kill the smart people first.
I have to disagree with this assessment. Capitalism is not something that exists in and of itself; that is, something that occurs naturally. If that were true, then capitalism would have been around for a much longer period of time. In terms of human history (for homo sapiens sapiens), hunter/gatherer societies have been the norm. I wasn’t until the advent of the agricultural revolution (roughly 10,000 years ago), then human socieites became more stratified. A very good argument could be made that the seeds of capitalism were born when humans began relying on agricutlure as their primary means of exisitence (a sort of proto-capitalism, if you will).
I’ll agree that socities have evolved over time. I’ll will also agree that human beings seem to have an innate tendency to form social bonds/organizational structures that are hierarchical in nature. But I disagree that capitalism was somehow pre-ordained; or in other words, your interpretation of capitalism vis-a-vis humans and human soceity is too teleological for my tastes.
Well, I enjoyed my last post in the Lenin thread, for which I expect to hear Sandinos howls of fury from my room. I’ll await the coming of any of the boards Marxist proponents and hope for a less retorically filled discussion…but I fear my hope is in vain.
I’ll just post this I found on the web last night. Its not really a reputable cite, which is why I didn’t use it in another discussion, but I found it fun anyway…and food for thought.
From Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, VII
Exactly. With all due respect to those who have posted so far, I’m most interested in hearing answers to my questions from some of the self-described Marxists here.
Ah, well, maybe they’re out Christmas shopping right now :D. Carry on.
Meriam Webster
Capitalism: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.
Can you give your definition of capitalism? I’m not sure you are talking about the same thing.
While I’m sure we can all agree that coorporations did not exist until recently. And most of us would agree that fuedalism was not very capitalistic. But the essential nature of private ownership of property is certainly not unnatural. Heck, there was even some type of capitalism in Soviet Russia. They outlawed it, but it was there.
I may be misrepresenting our early hominid ancestors, but if we imagine a band of “lucies” roaming the savana…
<excuse me, I have to visualize nakid hominids running after antelope for a second>
…I think it is easy enough for us to imagine them sharing food, tools, and each other in ways which resemble early forms of trade.
“Og give food yesterday! Gog help him today in hunt!”
How different is this from the coporate board room today?
The systems widely known as capitalism and socialism can at least in theory be broken down into (at least) two elements.
The first is ownership, government or private.
The second is planning/pricing, non-market vs. market.
Classic Capitalism is private ownership and market pricing.
Classic Socialism is government ownershiop and g. pricing.
You can imagine a society where all the businesses are owned by the state, but the managers are free to make pricing/investment decisions. Yugoslavia attempted this.
Much more common is a society where most firms are privately owned, but are heavily regulated/prodded into certain pricing/investment decisions. Japan and other East Asian regimes come to mind. Arguably, fascism as well.
If you want a ‘state of nature’, primitive hunter-gatherers tend towards public ownership of land, private owernship of tools and housing structures, and what would probably best be described as market pricing under some constraint of social pressures.
Non-land capital resources (tools, equipment, inventories) were typically privately held pre-1700. Land, on the other hand, was typically held in various forms of conditional tenure. Feudalism is the obvious illustration here, where the King/State owned everything de jure and possibly de facto as well, depending on how powerful and uppity the nobility and yeomen were.
A decent, standard definition of capitalism; I have no problem with that. But ask me this - can you show me where capitalism is? In other words, can you “point” to capitalism?
You can’t - from the definition above capitalism is a system. Sure, capitalism exists; but it was something that was created by human beings, not something that’s inherent in nature nor inherent of humans.
I don’t mean that the essential nature of private ownership of property is unnatural in the sense that it is alien. What I mean is that private property (as we know it today) isn’t something that is “found” in nature, nor the idea of private ownership of property (as we know it today within a capitalistic system) is an innate quality of human beings.
Exactly, but the key word is share. I no doubt that humans have some sense or idea of property, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to think that a hunter/gatherer’s conception of property is the same as our conception of what property is.
Look at it another way - you and I are hunter/gatherers living in an area that is abundant with hunting game, fish, and wild fruits and vegetables. If it’s relatively easy for you and I to satisfy our basic needs, why should any of us care whether one of claims a particular parcel of land over another? What claim do I have over a particular apple tree, for example? Or what claim do you have over a particular deer in a herd of deer? In other words, on what basis does is my claim to the apple tree justified; likewise, on what basis is your claim to a particular deer justified?
If I go to a coporate CEO and ask him/her - in all honesty - to share some of the corporate wealth with me, what do you think his/her response going to be?
OK - change the question to read - If I go to the largest shareholder of stock in a corporation and ask him/her - in all honesty - to share some his/her stock (wealth) with me, what do you think they would say to me (more than likely after they’ve stopped laughing)?
OK, can you show me where capitalism is? BadBoom!
We’ll get into the specifics later, but I think I can. I don’t think the basic principles of capitalism were created from whole cloth. They exist as an reasonable extension of simple physical facts.
Clearly. We understand property on a much more sophisticated level than animals or early hominids.
[QUOTE]
**Exactly, but the key word is share.
No, I think the key word is band. Sharing was not done on some random “your near me” sort of basis. Although the “lucys” most likely did not understand this, they shared resources amongst their band. They most likely defended those resources against or stole them from other bands. The bands would be closely related (not necessarily blood relations, but most likely close relations buitl up over time) individuals. They all helped other subsist and may have dispensed with unproductive members.
The concept of private property would not be sophisticated enough to hold herds, plants or land individually. But my jewelery, spear, and clothes are probably mine and not yours. Certainly the food I eat becomes mine. And that is all that is necessary for resources to be considered private. Again, I 'm sure they don’t understand private property the way we do. Just as I’m sure we don’t understand the migratory habits of game animals in quite the visceral way they probably did.
Actually, I think he will simply ask what you will give in return. Its called doing business.
Same answer.
I think you are trying to ask what anyone would say if you asked for some of her wealth for nothing in return. In which case, I think the answer would be the same as the “lucy” from our hypothetical. Although the “lucy” might be more agressive about it. Is it possible that she is more capitalistic?
OK, I know it is bad form to quote oneself, but I 'm not sure I did get into specifics clearly enough. I meant the furtherance of our homonid hypothetical to illustrate how you might consider such early bands capitalistic. Specifically, I meant to draw a parallell between their concept of owning tools and personal items with our understanding of private property. The idea is that an item becomes mine when I exert labor to turn it into something other than its natural state. It only stops being mine when someone else makes it theirs. Today, we require some amount of volunteered action by the giver. I’m not sure that primitives would have understood that. For quite a long time taking something by force may have been considered perfectly OK.
Oh, I wasn’t implying that capitalism was created from whole cloth. I do believe there are certain propensities in human nature that, given the right circumstances, are “triggered”, so to speak, and help form the basis for future activities.
I just wanted to counter the notion that capitalism is somehow an inherently “natural” system. I think it’s a huge stretch to somehow say a hunter/gatherer society and a modern, capitalistic society are the same - if anything, a hunter/gatherer society could be argued to be more “natural” than a capitalistic society. After all, it is the form of society that humans have had for much of their history (in re homo sapiens sapiens from 100,000 years ago to today).
To me, the real interesting questions are what were the “triggers” that forced hunter/gatherer socieities to adopt a predominantly agricultural society? And, in turn, what were the forces that helped bring about feudalism? Likewise, what were the forces that helped bring about capitalism as we know it today?
I must have missed something entirely when my mother told me to share my toys with my siblings when I was a child!
The sense of sharing I’m getting at is when I have something, and you have nothing. I then give you all or part of my share; you have not given me anything in return. Except maybe respect or esteem. Exchanging can be thought of as sharing, but only in the sense that I share what I have with you, and you share what you have with me. I would contend that my sense of sharing was more prevelant in hunter/gather socieities then the second sense (sharing as exchanging).
Right - I don’t have anything to give to the stockholder in return. I’m saying that the stockholder wouldn’t share (and then what’s to prevent other freeloaders like myself from doing the same thing? It’s just that capitalism as a system isn’t primarily set up for that kind of sharing.
I get what your saying, but I think you would be stretching the definition and meaning of capitalism quite a bit to fit a type of society/system that really ins’t appropriate. Of course hunter/gatherer’s would have had some sense of property with respect to tools and personal items, as well as other things. But what was there in place that prevented someone from taking other people’s stuff? Your right, for a long time it could be considered perfectly OK to take someone’s else’s stuff (for example, the divine right of kings; and wasn’t an argument for this that it was somehow “natural”?) But if we had that type of system today, capitalism wouldn’t be able to function.
First of all, Marxism is not a moralistic doctrine. We do not go around deciding who is a bad person and who is a good person. We do not preach to people how they should live their lives based on some supre-historical moral code. What we seek to do is to unite the working class based on its own interests and historic mission in overthrowing capitalism and instituting its class dictatorship. All morals have a class content; what is good according to one class is bad according to another. We solidarize with the entire working class, and have no interests apart from the interests of the working class as a whole.
You are quite right to ask what is in it for you. There are several reasons why I would claim that it is in your interest to overthrow capitalism. The first is that what you are living under now is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Every capitalist state, no matter how democratic, represents the class rule of the capitalist class. Elections in these states are merely a chance, every couple years, to decide upon which member of the ruling class gets to rob and oppress the people. In the real centers of power–the army, courts, schools, corporations, etc.–there is no democracy whatsoever. All of the insitutions of bourgeois society, in some way or another, serve the purpose of producing profit for the tiny minority of exploiters that owns the means of production–the mines, factories, shipyards, etc. Everything else is subordinated to this purpose.
But how does the bourgeoisie make a profit in the first place? Well, profit is made by extracting surplus labor from the workers. All value is simply the congealed labour time of working people. Profit is created when the workers provide more labor power than what they were paid for. That is, during an working day, a worker is paid for only a portion of the time that she or he works; the rest is provided gratis to the employer. This is what we call “wage slavery.” Under the capitalist system, workers are compelled to sell their labor, and in this market the price of labour power is always lower than the value produced by the laborer. In other words, capitalism is simply a way of expropriating the products of labor from those who create it.
The second reason why you should overthrow capitalism is that you are being robbed. Every day you create profit for the capitalists you work for by creating more value than what you are recompensed for.
Thirdly, capitalism is prone to shocks and crises. What may appear a solid job with good long-term prospects today can easily turn into a pink slip tomorrow. Every gain of the workers under capitalism is partial, and moreover highly reversible. The attacks on labor being made by the current administration (up to and including invoking the slave labor Taft-Hartley Act) are part of a larger effort to roll back ALL of the gains labor made in the militant battles of earlier decades. There is a constant battle between capital and labor over wages, hours, etc., that is to say, the class struggle never ceases.
Another reason to overthrow capitalism is that capitalism will eventually grind the working class to dust, and civilization itself will be smashed. The never-ending race to the bottom only intensifies under international competition, which, ever since the collapse of the USSR, has returned to its “natural” state. Every capitalist class seeks to increase its profits at the expense of every other. This means lowering the wages at home, increasing working hours, etc., and also increased exploitation of the toiling masses in the “third world.” Eventually this struggle turns into trade wars, which become shooting wars. This will lead inexorably to a new world war, a thermonuclear war this time, which will extinguish all life on Earth. Thus, another reason to overthrow capitalism is to preserve life on Earth.
Furthermore, a socialist economy would be vastly more productive than a capitalist economy. Only under socialism can the vast productive potential created under capitalism be put to its full use. The economy would grow by leaps and bounds, and, since the economy would be planned, production would be geared toward meeting human needs. The material standard of living of every worker would be dramatically improved.
So, briefly, I would say that you should want to overthrow capitalism for the following reasons: (1) to improve your own personal standard of living, (2) to create a stable system for yourself and your family, (3) to put an end to oppression and exploitation, and (4) to avoid a thermonuclear war. It is in the interest of every worker to overthrow this vicious system, since it is a system that rests on the exploitation of the entire working class for the benefit of a tiny minority. I like the old IWW (the wobblies) slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all!”
