Marxism

[Stylan]

Marxism has failed every time its been tried.

How? The USSR lasted 60+ years, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK and Laos still exist. I leave out China because i am not educated on China to know whether it is communist or not. Mao's China however, basically achieved full communism.

[Dominioan]

Marxism has failed every time its been tried.

How? The USSR lasted 60+ years, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK and Laos still exist. I leave out China because i am not educated on China to know whether it is communist or not. Mao's China however, basically achieved full communism.

Those lasting a long time never did much good though.

[Joohan]

Sorta posting to find this again on view posts, but Marxism is pretty accurate on all sorts of things about class and class conflict. But he also leaves out other influencers, like faith. Anyone remember the Crusades?

Marx actually does address this. From the point of view of a proletarian, there is literally no difference between the crusades and the nationalist wars of WWI.
Both are upper-class conflicts with upper-class goals.

The Manifesto even states "the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord."

That a hierarchy exists within a system is not to say that their goals are not also the goals of the collective. Unless you are under the impression that anything beyond the individual is a spook, then collective goals do exist.

[Cisairse]

Marx actually does address this. From the point of view of a proletarian, there is literally no difference between the crusades and the nationalist wars of WWI.
Both are upper-class conflicts with upper-class goals.

The Manifesto even states "the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord."

That a hierarchy exists within a system is not to say that their goals are not also the goals of the collective. Unless you are under the impression that anything beyond the individual is a spook, then collective goals do exist.

Right, but Marxism doesn't claim that the proletariat seeks liberation at all times. In fact, the fact that they don't is a huge part of what Marx spent his life trying to advocate for - the idea that class consciousness is a sort of awakening from slumber that you need to be shaken to achieve.
Then you have the entire concept of lumenproletariat - members of the proletariat which actively fight against class-conscious communists.

None of this really conflicts with the idea of class dichotomy being a driving factor of history.

[Joohan]

That a hierarchy exists within a system is not to say that their goals are not also the goals of the collective. Unless you are under the impression that anything beyond the individual is a spook, then collective goals do exist.

Right, but Marxism doesn't claim that the proletariat seeks liberation at all times. In fact, the fact that they don't is a huge part of what Marx spent his life trying to advocate for - the idea that class consciousness is a sort of awakening from slumber that you need to be shaken to achieve.
Then you have the entire concept of lumenproletariat - members of the proletariat which actively fight against class-conscious communists.

None of this really conflicts with the idea of class dichotomy being a driving factor of history.

I don't know if class would be the right word in this instance. I think that, instead of saying that history is driven by the ruling class, it should rather be said that history is driven by - the driven. People of means and a drive to access those means tend to have a way of amassing wealth and influence - this not being a result of what class they were born into, rather just their character. Poor yet driven people have influenced history just as much as the rich have.

[Stylan]

How? The USSR lasted 60+ years, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK and Laos still exist. I leave out China because i am not educated on China to know whether it is communist or not. Mao's China however, basically achieved full communism.

Those lasting a long time never did much good though.

Really? Eradicating poverty, homelessness, drastically increasing living standards and life span, almost eliminating stillborn pregnancies, feeding everyone, extremely high employment, thriving arts and culture, legalizing gay, women and POC rights before the U.S. and putting a roof over everyone's head isn't much good?

[Joohan]

Those lasting a long time never did much good though.

Really? Eradicating poverty, homelessness, drastically increasing living standards and life span, almost eliminating stillborn pregnancies, feeding everyone, extremely high employment, thriving arts and culture, legalizing gay, women and POC rights before the U.S. and putting a roof over everyone's head isn't much good?

... What?

[Allenstadt]

I agree with a lot of what Marx says, (And frankly I though it was shocking that he had to put forward school for children as part of his proposals, which really shows the state of society then), but i am nt as virulently anti-capitalist as he his. More of a very left-leaning capitalist.

[Stylan]

Really? Eradicating poverty, homelessness, drastically increasing living standards and life span, almost eliminating stillborn pregnancies, feeding everyone, extremely high employment, thriving arts and culture, legalizing gay, women and POC rights before the U.S. and putting a roof over everyone's head isn't much good?

... What?

Homosexuality was legalized in the Soviet Union in 1917. Homosexuality was legalized in Cuba since 1979 (though it was still discriminated against.)

Women obtained the right to vote in the USSR in 1917. They were the first country to do so. Discrimination against blacks was not nearly as strong as it was in Soviet Russia as it was in the U.S., however this could be due to the fact there were very few blacks in the USSR.

The USSR had an extremely similar diet and calorie consumption, and at one time, had higher calorie consumption daily then the U.S. (that is from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization by the way.)

Cuba has practically eliminated hunger:
https://www.wfpusa.org/countries/cuba/#

But yeah, maybe Marxism sucks because the CIA written textbook you were given in school tells you so.

[Cisairse]

Right, but Marxism doesn't claim that the proletariat seeks liberation at all times. In fact, the fact that they don't is a huge part of what Marx spent his life trying to advocate for - the idea that class consciousness is a sort of awakening from slumber that you need to be shaken to achieve.
Then you have the entire concept of lumenproletariat - members of the proletariat which actively fight against class-conscious communists.

None of this really conflicts with the idea of class dichotomy being a driving factor of history.

I don't know if class would be the right word in this instance. I think that, instead of saying that history is driven by the ruling class, it should rather be said that history is driven by - the driven. People of means and a drive to access those means tend to have a way of amassing wealth and influence - this not being a result of what class they were born into, rather just their character. Poor yet driven people have influenced history just as much as the rich have.

I disagree, though. History isn't shaped by exceptional events, really. When I say history of course I don't mean the contents of a textbook, I mean how human society is organized and how those organizations have changed over time.
Those changes have nearly exclusively come from class conflict. The dictatorship of the aristocracy looked very similar for non-aristocratic members of society in mostly every country in which it occurred. The dictatorship of the bourgeois looks very similar for members of the proletariat in mostly every country in which it occurs.

I wouldn't say that eg the crusades really had any effect on the greater history of humanity, except that in a sense the 4th Crusade hastened the rise of the merchant class in Italy, which in turn hastened the rise of the bourgeois as a competitor for power against the aristocracy which, some hundreds of years later, led to the downfall of aristocratic dictatorships across the globe.

[Zottistan]

Marxism has failed every time its been tried.

Marxism is a critique of capitalism. It can't be "tried" because it's not a programmatic ideology. Specific programmes subscribing to Marxist critiques might be described as having failed, but that's a failing on the part of those programmes, not of Marxist critique.

[Ostroeuropa]

Crypto-Marxists are one of the major reasons society is coming apart at the seams at the moment.

Marxism has failed every time its been tried.

Marxism is a critique of capitalism. It can't be "tried" because it's not a programmatic ideology. Specific programmes subscribing to Marxist critiques might be described as having failed, but that's a failing on the part of those programmes, not of Marxist critique.

The critique informs a particular outlook and effectively compels people to view problems in a particular way. If their way of viewing problems is broken, their solutions will likewise be broken.

[Trollzyn the Infinite]

Marxism has been responsible for more death and destruction in the last century than any other ideology. It's quite obvious that it's fucking trash that belongs in the dumpster.

But oh, I forgot, "it wasn't REAL Marxism".

[Stylan]

Crypto-Marxists are one of the major reasons society is coming apart at the seams at the moment.

What the fuck are "crypto-Marxists?"

[Zottistan]

Crypto-Marxists are one of the major reasons society is coming apart at the seams at the moment.

Marxism is a critique of capitalism. It can't be "tried" because it's not a programmatic ideology. Specific programmes subscribing to Marxist critiques might be described as having failed, but that's a failing on the part of those programmes, not of Marxist critique.

The critique informs a particular outlook and effectively compels people to view problems in a particular way. If their way of viewing problems is broken, their solutions will likewise be broken.

If the critique itself is wrong, then yeah in that instance you could say Marxism has failed. But to say the critique failed because programmes ostensibly built on it have failed doesn't track. A common liberal platitude on Marxist critique is that it gets the diagnosis right and the prognosis wrong, but the thing is it doesn't actually make a prognosis. That's made by programmatic ideological structures supposedly derived from Marxism.

[Stylan]

Marxism has been responsible for more death and destruction in the last century than any other ideology. It's quite obvious that it's fucking trash that belongs in the dumpster.

But oh, I forgot, "it wasn't REAL Marxism".

Really? Where's your evidence for that?

I'm willing to bet you don't actually have a source, and you just regurgitate what's fed to you on TV. Well that myth comes from the Black Book of Communism, which the authors themselves have said isn't accurate, as the editor raised the numbers drastically.

Or it comes from the Victims of Communism foundation, which counts people who die of coronavirus and literal Nazis killed by Red Army soldiers as "victims of communism."

Or you use the idea that "800 billion trillion people starved in the USSR and China," which is patently false. Not only that, even if it was, do you know how many people die in capitalist countries every year because of starvation?

[Cisairse]

Marxism has been responsible for more death and destruction in the last century than any other ideology. It's quite obvious that it's fucking trash that belongs in the dumpster.

But oh, I forgot, "it wasn't REAL Marxism".

That's such a ridiculous claim it's nearly unfathomable.

[Joohan]

Homosexuality was legalized in the Soviet Union in 1917.

And then recriminalized just 16 years later, now with gulag time tagged on!

Women obtained the right to vote in the USSR in 1917.

Women could vote in America as far back as 1869. Because of the federal nature of the United States, not every state took it all up at once. By 1917, only 15 of the 48 states didn't have some level of women's suffrage. The USSR was by no means revolutionary on that front.

Discrimination against blacks was not nearly as strong as it was in Soviet Russia as it was in the U.S., however this could be due to the fact there were very few blacks in the USSR.

Jew's, Chechens, Cossacks, Tartars, Estonian's, Koreans... The Soviet Union's use of genocide, deportation, and ethnic cleansing made the United State's bigotry look mild by comparison.

The USSR had an extremely similar diet and calorie consumption, and at one time, had higher calorie consumption daily then the U.S. (that is from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization by the way.)

That's good they managed to eventually begin feeding their people. The difference in this case, however, is that the United States never had a mass famine in the first place. They've had droughts, they've had year long dust storms, they've had mass exodus of the farmers from their fields ( all this in the same year mind you ) - but the United States has never had a famine, let alone one that killed millions of people...

[Zottistan]

Marxism has been responsible for more death and destruction in the last century than any other ideology. It's quite obvious that it's fucking trash that belongs in the dumpster.

But oh, I forgot, "it wasn't REAL Marxism".

Seriously my guy, "That wasn't real Marxism" isn't a thing any Marxist or Marxian would tell you, because it doesn't make any sense. It would be the equivalent of saying "Stalin was an atheist who killed x trillion people, but that wasn't real atheism". It doesn't track because "real Marxism" isn't anything other than a specific critique of capitalism. What leftists may tell you is that the Soviet Union never achieved real communism, which is a different story and a weak argument, or more likely that Soviet-style state socialism isn't the only programme for governance compatible with Marxist critique, which is better and more or less accurate.

[Trollzyn the Infinite]

Marxism has been responsible for more death and destruction in the last century than any other ideology. It's quite obvious that it's fucking trash that belongs in the dumpster.

But oh, I forgot, "it wasn't REAL Marxism".

Really? Where's your evidence for that?

I'm willing to bet you don't actually have a source, and you just regurgitate what's fed to you on TV. Well that myth comes from the Black Book of Communism, which the authors themselves have said isn't accurate, as the editor raised the numbers drastically.

Or it comes from the Victims of Communism foundation, which counts people who die of coronavirus and literal Nazis killed by Red Army soldiers as "victims of communism."

Or you use the idea that "800 billion trillion people starved in the USSR and China," which is patently false. Not only that, even if it was, do you know how many people die in capitalist countries every year because of starvation?

It comes from the death tolls of the Holodomor, the Cultural Revolution, and every other heinous genocide, war, and massacre committed under a Red Flag.

Stop trying to rewrite history because it doesn't support your narrative. Communism is a con that has left over half the world in devastating poverty.

[Cisairse]

The USSR had an extremely similar diet and calorie consumption, and at one time, had higher calorie consumption daily then the U.S. (that is from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization by the way.)

That's good they managed to eventually begin feeding their people. The difference in this case, however, is that the United States never had a mass famine in the first place. They've had droughts, they've had year long dust storms, they've had mass exodus of the farmers from their fields ( all this in the same year mind you ) - but the United States has never had a famine, let alone one that killed millions of people...

Virtually every pre-industrial society regularly succumbed to famine when harvests had a bad year. It was characteristic of the feudal mode of production.

There was no substantial increase in the rate of famine occurrence during Leninist Russia, and in fact post-Stalin Russia rarely if ever succumbed to famine once industrial agricultural processes were established.

[Pangurstan]

Really? Where's your evidence for that?

I'm willing to bet you don't actually have a source, and you just regurgitate what's fed to you on TV. Well that myth comes from the Black Book of Communism, which the authors themselves have said isn't accurate, as the editor raised the numbers drastically.

Or it comes from the Victims of Communism foundation, which counts people who die of coronavirus and literal Nazis killed by Red Army soldiers as "victims of communism."

Or you use the idea that "800 billion trillion people starved in the USSR and China," which is patently false. Not only that, even if it was, do you know how many people die in capitalist countries every year because of starvation?

It comes from the death tolls of the Holodomor, the Cultural Revolution, and every other heinous genocide, war, and massacre committed under a Red Flag.

Stop trying to rewrite history because it doesn't support your narrative. Communism is a con that has left over half the world in devastating poverty.

While India's democratic institutions prevented famines, its excess of mortality over China—potentially attributable to the latter's more equal distribution of medical and other resources—was nonetheless close to 4 million per year for non-famine years. Supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book" to India, "the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of [...] Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone.

[Rojava Free State]

• Do you believe that Marx's views on the class dichotomy are valid, or reductionist? Some modern authors have claimed that Marx downplayed the role of intersectionality in oppression, but Marx himself wrote about gender roles etc often, including in the Manifesto.
• Is Marxism—Leninism revisionist, or is it merely an extension of Marx's views?
• Do you believe that Marx has been vindicated or damned by the more than 170 years since he began to publish his theories?

I believe Marx's views on class have held true since the dawn of civilization. Almost every modern society has had an upper class that often held more rights than the lower class, and in today's society that upper class consists of those who own capital. Class revisionism is a word made up by people with no interest in real progress posing as progressives. They focus on their own ethnic group or gender instead of focusing on the improvement of conditions for all people everywhere because they only care about their own group and no one else. Seriously, what kind of person says "what about black people?" When someone says "free healthcare for the poor." Like yes you stupid prick, black people will get free healthcare too if they can't afford healthcare. What, did you think we meant "free healthcare for everyone except blacks." Come on. We talk about getting workers rights for all workers and someone says "well what about latino immigrant farm workers." Uh, yeah? If we get rights for all workers then latino immigrant farm workers get rights too. Why is this concept so hard to grasp? If we help all poor people, your specific subset of poor people will be helped. You should frankly be happy we're helping all of the downtrodden instead of constantly making it about your group and yourself. At this point, the same people make the claim that left wingers think LGBT rights and women's rights are viewed as less important. They aren't. Once again, from the top, all human beings deserve equal rights. Everyone. I just think that class inequality is a more nagging issue in this current time than gender inequality. It doesn't mean I don't think gender inequality exists or that I approve of it. We can fight for the rights of more than one group of people without having to pick and choose who we fight for. You can walk and chew gum.

Okay now that I'm done ranting about why class reduction accusers are full of it, I think Marxist-Leninism is slightly revisionist. Marx observed society's ills of class conflict, and he explained his idea of what a better society looked like. Lenin put this into practice and showed what he thought was the way to create Marx's ideal society. He didn't create it of course, but marxist-leninists thought they would. Maybe revision isn't a good term for it. Maybe "an expanded philosophy" or "add on" is a better way to view Marxist-Leninism. Lastly, I think just the last 20 years alone have vindicated Marx's worldview. We're basically a world of workers and owners of profit. Some workers make more money than others and have better working conditions, but all workers share one thing in common. You're at the mercy of your employer. You don't have a choice but to work so you can eat, and whatever your employer decides to do is more often than not what ends up going down. Some of us are fortunate enough to he unionized like myself, but unions are a dying concept in America and to this day, even jobs that have unions often try to go around the unions anyhow. Even a top notch lawyer is relying on his boss for the means to buy food and keep a roof over head. If he gets fired, it's a pipeline to a tent city in San Francisco. There's a slippery slope down to the streets. The owners of capital don't have to worry about "losing their job." They have far more control over the way they acquire their money and while they may fall on hard times, only the total collapse of their business will damage them in a significant way. A simple recession could put you or I out of a job, onto the street. Think about that. I don't agree completely with Marx's solution to the problem, but I think Marx was correct in pointing out that there is a problem, and it seems to be getting worse nowadays.

[Bieva]

Hello NSG, I'd like to open a conversation about Marxism.

To preface this post, I consider myself a Marxist, but I am not a communist. I believe that Marx's philosophy is correct and valid, but I disagree with the political solution to the problems he identified.

For those of you unaware what Marxism is, I highly recommend you go and read The Manifesto of the Communist Party[/ir]. It is a very quick read (less than 100 pages), but covers most of Marx's theories as an overview.

Marx's economic and political theories were expanded upon greatly in his other works; most notably [i]Capital (which I have read Vol. 1 of), The German Ideology, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and many other written works.

To start off this discussion, I have a few questions for the community:

• Do you believe that Marx's views on the class dichotomy are valid, or reductionist? Some modern authors have claimed that Marx downplayed the role of intersectionality in oppression, but Marx himself wrote about gender roles etc often, including in the Manifesto.
• Is Marxism—Leninism revisionist, or is it merely an extension of Marx's views?
• Do you believe that Marx has been vindicated or damned by the more than 170 years since he began to publish his theories?

I find it pretty interesting that you agree philosophically but not politically with Marxism, since a lot of modern socialists criticise capitalism for primarily ethical rather than material contradictions, but maintain that the solution Marx intended as the way to resolve these contradictions is also the most humane.

What would you say are the political solutions to the problems he identified?

[Warith]

I'm neutral on Marxism as a whole. I haven't seen enough examples of it to form a solid opinion. That being said, one issue I have seen with it is that problems will occur when there is an attempt to take a group with a strong cultural identity or multiple identities and make it into a communist/socialist system.

One of the reasons why Cuba was and is successful was that it is a more recently formed culture. Even then, its cultural identity consisted of a weld of other cultural identities. It was less than 100 years into its existence that it held its revolution, there was room in the culture to have a communist/socialist system integrated into it.

But eh, that makes sense in my head, probably not in words.