That is both true and, by itself, trivial. There is a long distance between identifying class struggle as a commonplace of all post-mesolithic human social life, and identifying class struggle as any kind of engine of history.
I think one could confidently say that when any two groups of people, no matter how they are defined, ever come into contact, conflict will eventually arise. Rich/poor, Christian/Muslim, man/woman, Yankee fan/Mets fan - whenever people are assigned to groups, they’ll fight with other groups.
You got examples of these non-class and/or inter-class struggles?
No. Again, capitalism’s replacement by communism is not inevitable. Marx never said it was. What is inevitable in any class society, however, is economic and political crisis. Capitalism is no exception; it’s staggered from recession to boom to depression to moderate recovery to slump and back again like a drunkard on muscle relaxants. Marx basically said there are two possible ways out of it: the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society or social collapse. Neither is inevitable; both depend on the balance of class forces and their level of political consciousness and organization when push comes to shove.
Except it’s not, because Christians basically said ‘sit back and wait, Jesus will come back sometime’, whereas Marx said ‘Nobody is going to do this for you, you need to organize and make it happen yourselves’.
None whatsoever, so it’s a good thing Marx didn’t waste his time with them.
Again, the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy relies on a complete absence of supporting arguments, simply rejecting the premise with no further analysis. This I have not done when discussing the nature of places like the USSR, China, Cuba, and North Korea - quite the opposite. So that take strawman away and put him to better use somewhere else.
BG, that is exactly what Marx did through his writings on history and in his analyses of contemporary events - located the engine of social change in class struggle. He started out by noting it was a common feature of human societies in every age and went from there.
Yes, well, bear in mind that any perceived conflicts in group interests are imaginary for most of those, but very real for social classes.
But, obviously he was wrong. Roman slavery did not die out from slave revolts. Serfdom did not die out because the serfs resisted. How many significant social/political changes, in Marx’ time or before (or since), were caused by real class conflicts? Very few. Certainly not the American Revolution. Arguably not even the French Revolution.
Off the top of my head I’d say the Punic Wars for Rome and the Hittite invasion for Egypt. There are plenty of examples of wars or strife in Rome and Egypt (and just about everywhere else) that have little or nothing to do with ‘class’…though, at a guess, you are going to trot out some twisty explanation that makes them all class struggles (let me guess…something along the lines that it was the ruling classes that started these wars and the working classes that just had to go along with them or were tricked into supporting them, etc etc).
Inter-class I’d say the various civil wars would be good examples in both cases.
I see. So, reading between the lines here, capitalism might just continue on indefinitely, with some modifications, and we might never see a communist revolution or replacement. Correct?
Ok…so, Marx advocated a proactive approach. But then claimed that the forces and balance had to be just right to achieve it, and that even then it wasn’t inevitable…correct?
Many communists believed (and I use that word specifically) that communism was inevitable, based on their supposed scientific calculations using the dialectic (IIRC). If it wasn’t Marx who advocated, out of curiosity who was it? I’ve read some of Marx and some Engels (as well as Lenin and a few others), but that was in college MANY years ago.
When I do a Google search for ‘Karl Marx’s predictions’ I get a LOT of hits, and a lot of articles discussing various Marx’s type predictions about the future trajectory of Capitalism, Communism and various other vectors of society. Yet you seem to be saying that Marx made no such predictions. My question to you is…why are so many people wrong about the fact that Marx made predictions (that mostly, according to most of the articles I see here haven’t panned out), yet you claim he didn’t? How are they wrong and you right? I’m not asking for a cite here, just your explanation as to why it seems so widespread that people think he made a lot of predictions.
Well, if you acknowledge that USSR, China, Cuba etc were in fact communist and embodied the ideals of communism then I will gladly burn that strawman…and give my apologies. I’m used to communist supporters denying this, or claiming that these were simply the pre-cursors for the REAL communist countries that would emerge in the future.
-XT
Sez you. Both were examples of bourgeois capitalist society overthrowing the tottering remnants of feudalism - in France much more completely than in the US, of course, but the principle is still the same: Social, economic, and political power transferred from one class to another and society was reconstructed along new lines.
Don’t quit your day job to go into prognosticating. The Punic wars were imperialist struggles between two ruling classes, and no revolutionary reconstitution of society occurred after Rome won. Same for the Hittite invasions of Egypt. That does nothing to disprove that said revolutionary reconstitutions only occur through class struggle, or that class struggle is the motor of progress and social change.
No. Marx was clear that any form of class society cannot avoid crises. Capitalism is no exception, and it is impossible for it to continue indefinitely. We either manage to throw the whole lot out and build something new, or we end up with something that could make Nazi Germany pale by comparison.
You’re getting closer, yeah.
Anyone who uses the dialectic to prove the inevitability of anything grossly misunderstands it. The dialectic is a tool for understanding how the world works, and it is used to try to analyze, not to predict.
Advocated what? Communism? Of course Marx advocated communism, but advocating something does not automatically mean believing it’s inevitable.
I would suggest going back and re-reading it, then, instead of going on fuzzy memories for your arguments.
Because then it’s easier to dismiss Marx’ writings and though without actually having to read any of it in-depth. I’ve read a number of articles where people claim Marx said a lot of stuff, but it’s patently clear that the closest they ever came to reading him was hefting a copy of Capital, Vol. I for a few minutes before putting it back on the bookstore shelf. I claim Marx didn’t make predictions because I’ve actually read his works.
Well, see, I don’t. But therein lies the problem and your gross misunderstanding of the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy. NTS does not automatically kick in once someone says “This A is not B”. If I simply said “China is not Communist because no real Communist would do what they do”, then you’d be completely justified in invoking NTS. If, on the other hand, I say something like “China is not Communist because the revolution in 1949 was not actively made by a politically conscious, organized Chinese working class but was instead imposed from above, in direct contradiction to everything Marx and Engels wrote”, then I’m using objective criteria against which I then measure the Chinese Revolution and find it wanting - similar to arguing that this fellow in the kilt is not a Scotsman because his birth certificate is from Kathmandu and DNA testing shows his ancestors have been living in Nepal for the last five hundred years.
Again, in short: Denial is not automatically NTS. Only an absence of arguments based on outside, objective criteria make it so.
-Invention of electricity
-Invention of the internet
-Invention of the personal computer
-Invention of antibiotics
-Invention of agriculture
-Invention of mass production
-The rise of Greek democracy
-The Revolutionary War and the creation of the American Republic
-The United States’ civil rights struture
-Roe V Wade
etc, etc, etc.
Communism is accepted on faith, and a view that sees “class struggle” as the engine of progress and social change is a faith-based narrative that has no passing relationship with reality.
Wrong. Slaves rather obviously kept their social/econoimc class and lack of any political power and women did not have representation either. Calling it “class warfare” is simply ignorant.
It was a class struggle between the eupatrids who monopolized political power before democracy was introduced and the unprivileged citizens who had it after. And it did make a difference. If it did not, why did you even mention it on your list? And that same class struggle went on throughout the Greek world during that period, from polis to polis, sometimes the democrats winning, sometimes the oligarchs coming back and putting them down, sometimes the democrats finding that they had only replaced the oligarchs with a tyrant – and sometimes regretting that, sometimes not. One can hardly understand Classical Greek history at all without class struggle.
No. Every conflict between those who have power and those who do not have power is not a “class struggle”. The facts that only certain citizens were included and that no slaves (the actual lowest class) were included shows that it wasn’t about class, it was about power. It was not a conflict between those who owned the means of production and those who worked, it was a conflict between those who held legislative and political power and only some of those who did not.
You seem to be responding to an argument that nobody has made.
The rise of Athenian democracy was, most certainly, a change.
What it was not is an example of “class warfare”.
So if neither is inevitable, why can’t we just continue to muddle along like we’ve always done? It’s kind of funny, because Europe went through this predicted period of revolutionary overthrow combined with social collapse. In the 30s. And it ended with Hitler shooting himself in a bunker underneath Berlin. Even you admit that by 1945 the Soviet Union was nothing resembling a worker’s revolutionary state.
But I’ll go ahead and agree that Capitalism is doomed to lurch from crisis to crisis. Just like any system of human organization. What I dispute is that there could be some system of social organization where such crises do not exist.
Actually, that’s too strong. Maybe such system will arise. But I have no good reason to believe that Marxist communism would be such a system, since no such system has ever existed, and the small scale experiments in communism that you like to bring up (like the Paris Commune) certainly weren’t free from crisis.
I can imagine that sometime in the future, the economic system we call “capitalism” will be as obsolete as feudalism, or hunting and gathering. However, such a system won’t bear much resemblance to the musings of Karl Marx, nor will it be devoid of crisis.
That was a class struggle, because the groups in question were social classes, defined by ancestry and property or lack thereof. It was about class and it was about power – the relative power of the classes in society. And, of course it was a struggle between those who owned the means of production and those who worked. The eupatrids owned the most of the most important means of production in existence, farmland, and mostly did not work it with their own hands.
And it was no less a class struggle because slaves and women were left out of it; nor was it any less a class struggle if it did not actually aim at redistribution, communism, or a classless society.
Actually, I’m getting just the opposite vibe. I’d say I was pretty close to being spot on to your response. I even had a little side bet that I’d see the key words ‘imperialist struggles’. 
You asked for examples of non-class or inter-class related struggles. The war’s between Rome and Carthage weren’t between two classes, they were between city states. Class didn’t come into it. I said nothing about whether or not ‘no revolutionary reconstitution of society occurred after Rome won’ and frankly don’t see what this has to do with anything. They are examples of struggles that people when through that didn’t have much or anything to do with class struggles…which was the original question you asked me to answer. Again, I see the majority of human history as being a struggle…and very little of it being CLASS struggle.
Unless of course you twist and turn things to make them fit some odd definition of ‘class struggle’, which I’ve found many communist types seem to do.
Since human nature is pretty much hierarchical, and since no functioning human society will ever be ‘classless’, that seems to match the conclusion that humans will always be struggling, and periodically having crisis.
Well, these weren’t ‘real’ communists, obviously, or they would have clearly understood that.
No…if you read the sentence before the one you quoted, perhaps it would be more clear what I’m asking:
I’m asking you that if Marx wasn’t the one who predicted that communism was inevitable, who was? It seems to have been a recurring theme by generations of, um, non-communist communists. So…where did this idea spring from?
Or, you could answer my questions and fight my ignorance yourself, instead of basically telling me to go back and read through the material I read through over a decade ago. Basically, if I read it I’m going to draw the same conclusions I drew before, which was that it was mostly psudo-scientific horseshit. YOU, however, may have a different perspective than I do…no?
I see. So, people who claim he made predictions are doing so merely to be able to write him off? What about the non-communist communist types who believe in what he wrote? Did they read something different than you did…or are they all too stupid to grasp the truths you’ve gotten out of the writings? Or did they not actually read his works?
I see. So, by defining that the only canonical way to become a ‘communist’ is to do so exactly as Marx (and Engels of course) predicted, you can discount their failure, then it’s not a NTS situation? Well…that’s pretty interesting. So, if real communism arises (as remote as that possibility seems in terms of probability), it wouldn’t be ‘real’ communism either, and you’d be as quick to discount it on that basis? Fair enough.
-XT
Technological advancements all, and important ones to be sure, but certainly did nothing to change the class nature of capitalism. ‘Progress and social change’ in the context of this argument means a radical restructuring of the socioeconomic and political structure of society, not technological advances.
Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. These are all fine examples of class struggle. Athenian democracy - arguably the best example of Greek democracy - rose from the overthrow of the dictatorship of Hippias in 510 BCE. It didn’t just happen by chance, it came about through the struggle of those oppressed by the dictatorship and who wanted radical change. The American Revolution was a struggle of the Colonial American bourgeoisie against the power of Britain’s feudal monarchy, placing power in the hands of a new and different class as a result. The civil rights structure we have today in the US would not have been possible without the struggle by both Blacks and whites throughout the 1950s and 1960s - the sit-ins at lunch counters, the Freedom Rider voter registration drives, the Montgomery bus boycott. Those are some of the struggles that got the results from Johnson in '64 and '65. And Roe v. Wade - hell, in the decision itself the Supreme Court acknowledged they had to find for legalizing abortion because they would otherwise face a crisis of legitimacy thanks to the groundswell of organized struggle from below that pushed the issue. Working men and women organizing to fight for a greater share of social justice and greater rights for women - radical change. Class struggle.
Lemur866, the Paris Commune was knee-deep in crisis because it was in the middle of a bloody, vicious war. Not because of any theoretical failings. One only need read up on the aftermath to understand what they were up against.
Muddling along doesn’t work. Muddling along got us the Great Depression and WWII. Going along hoping the system will figure things out for itself is a recipe for bitter, bitter disappointment.
How did he distinguish between “captains of industry” and “owners of the means of production”?
By entrepreneur, I mean anyone who starts a business, large or small.
More important (or relevant) than owning the “means of production” is ownership of debt or the “means of providing capital”. IOW, it doesn’t matter if you own the factories and machinery if it must all be paid off to the bank.
Exactly. But it doesn’t disprove my assertion that radical social change - a/k/a the revolutionary reconstruction of society - comes through class struggle. You said, earlier, that ‘class struggle’ was just one of the things we as humans struggled over. Reading between the lines, I got the impression that you were saying any struggle could be the motor of social change, not just the struggle between different social classes.
It’s the main point of the argument. Where does radical social change come from? Struggle in general, or class struggle in particular?
And therefore, what?
Well, off the top of my head there’s the German Social-Democrat Karl Kautsky, who argued that socialism would gradually slide into place by electing the right people. Probably also Eduard Bernstein, who said the workers only needed to fight over economic issues and the political questions would more or less take care of themselves. There’s also Stalin, whose ignorance literally filled volumes. But I’m sure there are other, earlier sources for this gross misinterpretation of Marx’ arguments as well.
God forbid anyone should ask you to do any work in a discussion. Much more fun to pull misinterpretations out of thin air and slap a veneer of ad hominem onto 'em, isn’t it?
Yeah. I see it you go back, read it, come up with questions to ask, then we have a more in-depth discussion of the subject. Right now it’s just you lobbing hints about my personal arrogance because you can’t come up with anything better.
Case in point.
Also, BG is spot on about the history of Athenian democracy.
Also, they don’t eat their porridge with sugar, as any True Scotsman would. The actual claim you made was that only “class struggle” drives “progress and social change”.
That you want to claim that everything from the switch from hunter-gather society to the invention of personal electronics and easily accessible information to modern medicine didn’t amount to “progress” or “social change” is your call, but the goalposts, they surely are a movin’.
None of them are.
Not alone any economic lines or class lines, at all, as women and slaves were totally left out. It was a power grab by those who hadn’t had power. But as Communism is a faith-based worldview, it has to be shoehorned into “class struggle” even when there was absolutely no attempt to elevate the lower economic/social classes, but simply to give certain men, only, more power than they’d had.
Nope, yet again ideology getting in the way of history. It was a struggle of American’s political leadership wanting to have more power and control than they were given by the UK’s political leadership. And then they, quickly, instituted a system in which we still had slaves, women still couldn’t vote, etc, etc, etc.
It’s obvious that you’re trying to cram conflicts where there is a difference in the participants into “class warfare”.
Which were not based on class or economics, at all, but on human rights for blacks. And as privileged whites stood along side oppressed blacks, it’s an absurdity to claim that it was an instance of “class warfare”.
So now popular sentiment is “class warfare”, too. 3D movies are very popular now because the studios believe that in order to compete with home theater systems and give the people what they want while being seen as a legitimate investment of dollars, they must provide 3D.
Therefore, 3D movies are the very object lesson of “class warfare” in action.
So now “class warfare” is so damn broad that absolutely anything that people who aren’t the idle-rich do is “class warfare”.
Your goalposts need frequent flier mileage and your definitions need to be chained down.