This is sooo rich. I hope that the conservatives on this board can now appreciate the importance of the Marxist distinction.
That said, I, like many leftists, appreciate Sandino’s critique of capitalism yet are left underwhelmed at the idea of creating another Bolshevik society at gunpoint.
OK, maybe “nature” is a stretch.
The system we have in the US isn’t capitalism for one thing. First and foremost, we have a democratic constitutional republic. We have a system of laws. By choice – not nature – we have a quasi-capitalist economic system.
Once you make civilization nature, capitalism is the default system. By way of example, in formerly Communist states there used to be private plots for farmers – sometimes. The tiny private farms outproduced the big collectives by any realistic measure.
Two ways for a Communist to look at that: 1) Good, now we won’t starve. 2) Bad, that proves how debauched our farmers are. Shoot them. Communists, to remain Communists, always end up going to #2, or they starve. Or, they aren’t good Communists.
The fundamental principle of capitalism is private property and the family structure. Communism turn this on its head by putting the state in charge of both property and the family.
It is far closer to a “state of nature” if you “own”* the house you live in, for example. Why does some bureaucrat in Washington have a superior interest to me?
Similarly, why should the state have a higher interest in propagandizing my (nonexistent) children than I do?
Anyway, sorry, I’ll go post in something else.
*You never “own” property. You have a bundle of rights that you carry with you until you die. You can devise your rights to a point. Even under our “capitalist” system, if there is no legitimate taker for property it escheats to the state.
OTOH…
Translation:
We (Communists) need to kill some people in the army, legal system, schools, business, etc. Nobody understands the conspiracy that controls us but Marxists. There is no need for any other politcal thought but Marxism. Everything you believe is a sham.
Kiss your electoral process goodbye. One great thing about voting Communist, you never have to vote again.
Errata,
As an apparent non-Communist leftist, do you feel that leftists who do sympathize with Communsim are morally equivalent to rightists who sympathize with Nazism or fascism?
Is it incumbent on both right and left to denounce their totalitarian extremist fellow travelers?
You are making the assumption that the creation of a novel product simply appears out of thin air. The workers who create automobiles, for example, would not have any"excess labor" if someone had not first designed and delveloped the automobile in the first place. Workers are always free to strike out on their own and liberate their own labor from the overhead of the “capitalists”. There is absolutely nothing that compels them to work for someone else.
Firstly, you are confusing capitalism with fuedalism. There are no premant classes in capitalism. Today’s worker can just as easily be tomorrow’s entrepeneur.
Sounds great. Unfortunately, you need to do more than just make an assertion to demostrate that it’s actually true.
As an economically ignorant fella may I ask
Where do employee owned companies fit in?
As an economically ignorant fella may I also ask
Where do small, independent businessmen fit in?
If I come up with the necessary material needs,(capital), to have a restaurant and hire some people to work in it, am I now a member of the bourgeoisie?
SimonX, yes you are.
Tell me, Communists, if since the price of a good has to be higher than the price paid to the labor in order to have a profit, are people who are in business for themselves necesarilly esploiting their own labor if they are successful?
i have a question. whats my motivation to invent?
i have some really good ideas in planning. if i were to engineer them what would my motivation to sell them? what produce chioces? capitalism with it’s many people competing to sell you stuff seems to produce quite a bit of verity. it also causes things to fall in price. under marxism would a $41 dollar dvd player ever be developed? since marxism seems to have a goverment owned monopoly on everything there would be no compitition. to use an example how under powered, under featured, and over priced would a nvidea be if it was the only video company?
Boris Yeltson weeped when he saw the verity in American stores.
2)This kind of sharing (at least when it is institutionalized and enforced by law) is a whole different animal.
3)I’m not sure which developed first. It seems reasonable to me to conjecture that early hominids must have spent much more time sharing and helping other members of their own band than they did taking resources from other bands. First of all bands with extra resources above subsistance which could be stolen were very rare indeed until well after agricultrue became the norm. So, perhaps it is reasonable to conclude that social bonding is more powerfully developed than conflict.
I suppose I should appologize for the hijack. Perhaps if I find a good reason to tilt at Sandino’s windmill I will.
i would like to point that question was meant assuming we all were marxists. just trying to aviod confusion from reading my posts.
Sandino, thanks for your reply. Obviously, you spent some time drafting it. To respond to every point you make would take more time than I’ve got right now, so I’m going to start with just the first couple paragraphs. I’ll address other points as time becomes available. Forgive the stream-of conciousness style, but I’m just expressing thoughts as they come to me.
Interesting concept, and one I can’t recall hearing in those terms before. You may very well be correct. From my point of view, it doesn’t feel like a dictatorship, but maybe that’s simply because I feel well enough compensated and have sufficient freedom of movement (economically, physically and socially) to live satisfactorily.
I’m afraid I do have to disagree with you on your rather rigid stance vis a vis ownership of all resources by a tiny ruling class. First of all, that seems to be a model of a particular early industrial-age condition, that, at least in the USA, is a poor fit to current reality. Someone in the other thread, I believe, mentioned that 70% of Americans hold equity, in the form of mutual funds, stocks or other instruments. Through my company’s 401(k) plan, I have significant positions in several mutual funds, thus, to a certain extent, I am profiting from the labors of others, while they, presumably, are not profiting equally from mine since the company I work for is privately-held. Perhaps that puts me over the line into the ruling class; I don’t know. If it does, however, it would appear that the ruling class is considerably larger and more flexible in composition than you seem to allow for.
There’s no question, of course, that the ruling class model could reasonably be applied to a number of states; Zimbabwe is one that springs instantly to mind. Certainly this was the case during the colonial period and during white rule, notably under the Ian Smith regime, and I think it can be fairly said under the rule of Mugabe and Zanu-PF. Of course, there is major irony in the fact that Mugabe, thoughout most of his career, apparently has presented himself as a Marxist.
That brings me to a major objection, that others have mentioned previously; a lengthy and dismal history of, presumably, “true” Marxism being usurped by tyrants. Despite your claim that elections in capitalist countries simply replace one thieving member of the ruling class with another, at least here in the US we can throw the bastards out, even if it only means setting up other bastards to replace them. On the face of it I see no great benefit to replacing a system that has certain checks and balances against gross abuse built in, with one in which any checks and balances, to be charitable, appear to be somewhat lacking. I’ll just mention that if it turns out the only control over abuse of the Marxist system would be something along the lines Mao’s perpetual revolution, with the Red Guards and all the horrors that entailed, I’m afraid you’ll have an uphill battle convincing anyone that your way is the way to go.
I’m not going to respond at length to the second point, in part because to some extent I have to agree it’s true: profit could be looked at as robbery from the workers who generate value. The question here is which part is really robbery and which is the cost of doing business; i.e. management, research, administration and so on. I think I understand what interest is and what it represents, so I don’t personally consider my contribution to the equity of a company to be pure robbery from me since, at some point, certain benefits will come back to me, such as my retirement income. To tell you the truth, I don’t spend an enormous amount of time dwelling on where the money I am supposedly being ‘robbed’ of goes, although I’m sure it might be a greater concern if I felt I was not living comfortably. Also, to better clarify the point, I’d need to know whether you feel the collection of taxes is part of that ‘robbery’.
Well, that’s enough for now; I’ll try to address the other points tomorrow.
Guys, you have got to learn to read between the lines. All the products we ever need have ALREADY been invented (by those evil capitalists). Look what he’s saying here…
From Sandino
See, what hes REALLY saying here is, socialism (Marxist communism) will work just fine if someone gives them a motor (i.e. builds all the factories for them, invents all the nifty things, then turns over the ‘means of production’ to the ‘workers and peasants’ etc etc). Then they will be happy. This guy is practically a parody of AR’s bad guys in Atlas Shrugged…“I could have done great if someone would only have given me a motor…”.
What he has yet to answer of course (well, one of many many things he hasn’t answered) is…why, ‘capitalist’ countries with social-democracies, are the VAST MAJORITY of people happy or at least content with the system? There IS no movement by the ‘workers and peasants’ towards his brave new world…why not? Why did the various socialist/communist experiments fail (here he will wave his arms and say it was because the evil democracies had it in for them, or that ALL countries need to be socialist/communist before it will work, etc etc). Why did they, uniformly and without exception, turn into brutal dictatorships killing millions of their fellow citizens. Why have nearly all of the old guard communist countries either partially or fully embrassed capitalism…even China? So many questions…so few answers. What we will most likely get is another speech at this point.
Basically the retoric he is spewing is still stuck in the 19th century…its a whole new world now. Even IN the 19th century this stuff was questionable…now its as relevant as the bible is as a guide to every day life.
I love this section best from the latest speech:
From Sandino
He starts off rationally enough…capitalism IS prone to ups and downs, no doubt about it. Socializing capitalism makes for smaller ups and downs (basically having controls on the market as we do in the US and most other countries considered ‘capitalist’ also have), true, but they are still there…we ALL know this from personal experience. He then gets increasingly more irrational from an empiric standpoint. In the end, its the gloom and doom that capitalism will (soon?) grind the world to dust and destroy the earth in nucleeah fi-ah. How this will come about is a mystery, since empirically we can see that free trade makes it more difficult for capitalist social-democracies to go to war, as their economies become interwoven.
-XT
I know I’m going to hate myself in the morning…
John Mace already covered the invention angle, so I’ll leave that to him.
I would like to make the point that workers are most definately NOT exploited under capitalism. If we have a group of workers How many cars will they produce with their labor alone? The answer of course is 0. Without the capital investment necessary to build the plant, buy the raw materials in bulk, develop and buy the tools, workers produce NOTHING! Considering that 1)The workers are free to pool their resources and build their own plant and 2)The outlays of capital described above have to be done with NO GUARANTEE of any return whatsoever, I could propose that the wages workers get are an extremely generous gift. Of course I’d be wrong. Because the answer is the same if we ask how many cars the capitalist will create without workers. Without their labor he will lose his investment.
They. Need. Each. Other.
The power of capitalism is that the person who is willing to make this massive risk and succeed gets compensated accordingly. So every potential capitalist becomes an economic observer looking for the next great thing to invest in. Under communism the commisar who decides to create a new plant gets the same paycheck each week wether it is a complete waste of time or a shining success. So every citizen becomes a drone going where he’s told and doing what he’s told without hope of improvement.
This lack of incentive is not a result of some naughty person perverting the great workers utopia. It is built into the basic tenets of communism. Notice how Sandino continues to admit that “the vast productive potential created under capitalism” is what the workers need to sieze. The essential failure of Marx was in failing to recognize that “means of production” is not a static commodity. Its like suggesting that you need to drain the oceans to ensure that we have enough trout.
If you seize all the factorys tomorrow across the whole world, they will fail in very short order. An economy is too dynamic a beast to measure from a central soviet. Central committies cannot even accurately measure an economy in a single country let alone the whole world. The ONLY way to efficiently allocate resources is to allow private citizens allocate their own. This is the only way you get the “every problem is shallow if looked at by enough eyes” solution for economics.
I’ll bow out and let you guys converse with this <---------> I get a sick feeling just reading his posts.
*Originally posted by pervert *
Hmm…maybe there’s a disconnect somewhere (probably me). I’m not sure what you mean by hunter/gatherer society being inherently un-capitalistic.
Maybe if I ask you this, then you might see what I’m trying to get at. If a hunter/gatherer society is really just a form of capitalism, then why make the distinction? What do the hunter/gatherers do that is similar to capitalistic socieities? What are the differences?
Furthermore, if one can identify hunter/gatherer societies as capitalistic in form, they why not societies based on socialism or communism? Or any other type of society? Why make the distinction?
I agree - and would contend is what makes capitalism distinct from other economic/social systems.
I think we’re pretty much in agreement here, although I think a good argument could be made that, given the right conditions, the propensity towards conflict becomes the more powerful of the two (especially between non-kin groups in hunter/gatherer societies in the case of population pressure vis-a-vis available resources; with the advent of agriculture the propensity more than likely tipped towards conflict).
**
Maybe the disconnect is mine. I thought I was trying to show that certain capitalistic tendencies are perfectly natural by showing that certain habits of our hypothetical early hominids were capitalistic.
This part of the confusion is probably my fault. I did not address when you said “you would be stretching the definition and meaning of capitalism quite a bit to fit …” the early hominids. I agree with this. I was not trying to say that these early humans were capitalist any more than modern bands of chimpanzees are. I was only trying to suggest that many aspects of capitalism (private property, and trade) occur naturally amonst these animals, and that a case might be made that modern capitalism was merely an extension (perhaps quite an estension) of these principles. I was certainly not making such a case. It would require far more evidence than I have presented here. I was just laying out the possibility of a hypothesis.
To answer the questions
I remember seeing a documentary about Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees ( I hope I’m remembering the correct simean researcher). She documented cases of canabilism, warefare amongst bands, even the rebellion of a small group which divided and went its own way. The point was made at the end that almost any behavior we can observe in moder humans can be seen in chimpanzees. I tend to think that our early hominid ancestors were very similar.
Legally enforced sharing is decidedly UNcapitalistic. so, I assume you are saying that NOT supporting this sort of sharing is the characteristic of capitalism which distinguishes it. If so, I agree. Of course I think there are other distinguishing characteristics. And I reserve the right to believe that such a characteristic is a good thing. 
**
[/quote]
I think we’re pretty much in agreement here, although I think a good argument could be made that, given the right conditions, the propensity towards conflict becomes the more powerful of the two (especially between non-kin groups in hunter/gatherer societies in the case of population pressure vis-a-vis available resources; with the advent of agriculture the propensity more than likely tipped towards conflict). **
[/QUOTE]
Definately, I agree, the most powerfull of the two absolutely. I still think that measured as a function of man hours, more people engage in trade rather than theft. But since the history of civilisation tends to be a history of war, this activity has a disproportionally large effect on society. That is, it can certainly be more powerful.
Oddly enough given the thread we are hijacking, I think this is the one thing Marx contributed to human understanding. That economic activity might be a better way to understand history. Unfortunately, he got caught up in his own personal interpretation of what economic activity was and this contirbution was lost.
Well, in the name of fighting ingnorance and all that I´d like to introduce you Lech Walesa and Inacio Lula Da Silva .
Sandino, I think that your assertions don´t hold water.
Hmm, well, that actaully would be Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva… it´s not easy to get that right on the first try. 
Those are two I can name from the top of my head, anyone knows other “from the bottom to the top” presidents?
Was Bill Gates ever a prole?
Dictatorship simply means direct rule based on force, that recognizes no law higher than itself. Capitalism represents the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in this sense, that they control all the levers of power, and exercise their unconstrained rule based on their control over the means of repression–police, army, courts, prisons, etc. They also control all the ideological institutions–schools, media, etc.–which means that they control the prevailing ideas, the ideology. Part of this ideology is precisely that their rule does NOT represent class rule, but is a democracy.
In any society there is always class struggle, though, nothing remains static. It is possible for workers to win some gains in a bourgeois democracy, but these are only won through militant struggle. NO decisive gain has EVER been won by voting or through the courts. They must be wrested from the grasping claws of the capitalists. Your feeling that you have things pretty good right now is not incorrect, but represents the fact that the working class has been able to win a few gains over decades of class struggle. Even the 8 hour day, for example, had to be won through bitter struggle, and every increase of pay or benefits, or a decrease in the working day, is only obtained when the capitalists have no choice. Furthermore, these gains are highly reversible. In fact, the mean wage of workers in the U.S. has been declining for the past few decades. I believe the minimum wage, for example, was something like $8.75 in 1973. The attack on living standards has been particularly acute over the last decade, as a result of the destruction of the USSR.
Not only your own living standard is under attack, but your children’s (if you have them) futures are looking dim. This is the first generation of Americans, in fact, that doesn’t look forward to a better life than their parents’.
In fact, it is more true today than ever. The concentration of ownership of the means of production has been accelerating over the past few decades. I don’t have the exact figures, but something like 1% owns 40% of the wealth. But this only tells a portion of the story. The real power lies in control over the banks, mines, shipping and other transport, energy, and autos. These major industries are controlled by an insignificant minority of the population, much much less than 1%. This is not something that is very controversial. I mean, it is simply a fact that the gap between rich and poor has been getting worse. Even bourgeois intellectuals like Kevin Phillips are “worried” about the accelerating gap. Phillips gives something of a history of this gap in Wealth and Democracy.
You are not part of the ruling class. As long as you are compelled to sell your labour power, you are a worker. The bourgeoisie consists of those who do not have to work, but make profit by hiring the labour of others.
The problems experienced by the countries of Africa cannot be boiled down to the policies of a few bureaucrats. These countries have been the victims of the most naked colonial oppression and exploitation for over 400 years.
From the Marxist understanding, for backward countries as exist in Africa, the only way out of neo-colonial oppression, and in the end, the only way to achieve even bourgeois democratic rights is through socialist revolution. If you look at a country like South Africa, for instance, you will see the importance of the economic structure. Life for black people in South Africa today is much like it was under the apartheid regime, in many respects it is worse. The country is still ruled by a tiny minority of super-rich white exploiters. The granting of formal political equality to black people had almost no effect on the actual day-to-day lives of the miserably poor masses. The only way out is for the masses to take power and rule directly through workers councils, expropriate the local bourgeoisie, and build a planned, collectivized economy.
It’s not that much of an irony. Throughout much of the “third world,” you can only be taken seriously if you claim to be a Marxist. So, pretty much everybody claims to be a Marxist. Mugabe hardly qualifies, though, and neither does the ANC, by the way.
It is a dismal history, to be sure, but then so is all of human history. When you sort of strip away all of the nonsense and propaganda, it really comes down to the kind of societies that have resulted from revolutions. Have they resulted in a superior type of society? Have they lifted the level of material well-being for the masses of the people? It is pretty clear that they have.
The USSR is, of course, very important in this regard, since it was the only society that was created by a workers revolution. And, it is simply undeniable that the USSR was able to advance at a rate that would be unthinkable under capitalism, that for the mass of the population it meant a much better life. The same is true of China, where, although the working class has never been in power, the planned, collectivized economy has brought enormous gains to the mass of the population.
The idea that you can “throw the bastards out” is an illusion. The bourgeoisie rules directly through the use of force. You have exactly zero political power. Elections are allowed as long as it is conducive to deciding amongst the bourgeoisie who they want to manage the state, but if they are used to undermine the power of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie simply resorts to fascism. They will never allow the people to threaten their rule with their own state machinery. This was one of the great insights of Marx. Commenting on the experience of the Parisian Communards in 1871, he said that the proletariat cannot simply take hold of the ready-made state machinery, but must smash it and erect its own. The executive of any capitalist state is simply a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie controls the funding of campaigns, they own the media, they control the police, courts, etc. It is simply false to say that their is any control whatsoever by working people over the capitalist state.
As far as abuses of power in a workers’ state goes, of course there are no guarantees. Unfortunately you can’t simply pass a law decreeing that there will be no abuse of power. Everything depends on the living class forces. The workers have to struggle to gain power, but the struggle doesn’t end there. The creation of a workers’ state is not a magical panacea that will instantly cure all evils. It only makes it possible to do away with hunger, disease, war, etc.
What is of prime importance for a Marxist is the economic system that underlies any political structure. As you can see in the case of South Africa, nothing changes by simply making a formal change in the political structure, for real change you have to change how people relate to property. We want to make it so that the working class controls its own destiny.
ALL profit is robbery, a theft of the living labour of others. Are you familiar with Marx’s labor theory of value?
Anyway, the main point is that those who labour must rule.